Overview

A business strategy articulates the overall direction of the business. It defines the intent of your business. A good business strategy should be clearly differentiated from those of other businesses in the same sector. Business strategies that are essentially identical to those of your competitors do nothing to help you differentiate your company from them – and potentially confuse your employees.

We’ll assess your overall business strategy and provide guidance if needed to accelerate you toward your desired vision.

Scope And Deliverables

One way to think of business strategy is to see it as a high level decision on positioning and direction – a decision that establishes a clear framework for subsequent decisions. Clearly strategy and decision-making cannot be separated. Therefore, without a general organizational competence for decision-making, the formulation of strategy will likely come up short.

Over the past several decades a handful of strategic frameworks have been popularized. Such frameworks have been helpful in providing a way to quickly communicate strategies to others. SatiStar’s business strategy consulting framework represents this new generation of strategic thinking. It goes further than earlier models by explicitly recognizing that the world is adaptive, by illustrating to a finer degree how businesses differentiate themselves and that an explicit path must be navigated.

Two fundamental perspectives to consider are:

• How do you see the world outside your business or organization.
• How do you see the “world” inside your business or organization.

For example, do you see the external world as a big buzzing confusion of existing and potential competitors and customers, along with an array of political and cultural factors? That’s one extreme – an inherently complex and unpredictable environment around you. The other extreme is that you see the external world as fully comprehensible and that your business has a significant ability to control or shape this external world.

This spectrum of views on the comprehensibility and controllability of the external world constitutes one dimension of the framework.

The other dimension corresponds to the view of the business. At one extreme of this dimension is a view that the business is generally rational in its decisions and behaviors, and that the business can be effectively segmented into parts for the purposes of developing strategy. At the other extreme is a view that the behavior of the business is complex, political, somewhat unpredictable, and therefore strategy development must be more holistic.

We recognize that cultural differences can make a huge difference in how organizations will create and pursue business strategy. North Americans in general tend to be oriented more towards the lower left quadrant (more analytical – primarily focused on the “what”), whereas Europeans tend to be more oriented towards the upper right quadrant (more synthetic – primarily focused on “how”).

What We Will Do

• Conduct an analysis of your existing business strategy (or strategies).
• Identify strengths and weaknesses in your strategy and its deployment.
• Guide your leadership team in the creation of an all-encompassing set of strategies that reflect the various environments in which your business operates.
• Facilitate the articulation and communication of a clear strategic intent statement.
• If desired, guide your leadership team in the deployment of the strategy by using our ISAD (Integrated Strategic Alignment and Deployment) methodology.

What We Need You To Do

• Ensure that your leadership team is committed to the establishment of a clearly articulated business strategy.
• Ensure availability of the entire leadership team for the strategy sessions (usually off-site).
• Communicate and deploy the strategy throughout the organization in a timely manner.
• Monitor progress towards the strategy.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

SatiStar's Experience Makes The Difference!