How lazy is your strategy?

Your strategy is lazy if it’s…

1. More internally focused than externally leading

I see too many company strategies that are straight line, incremental and focus far too much on internal improvements. Savvier are those with a great focus on their customers. But the best leaders have their eyes on the market view and what’s changing. More than that they are running actual scenarios to work new growth into their future. This invariably requires business model innovation

Disruption is something you should be doing, not something that is happening to you

2. Doesn’t have a portfolio of high risk and low risk elements

Changing the prevailing norms in markets rarely involves inventing new products and technology yourself. It does however involve new thinking. New thinking is often seen as risky by the majority. If you aren’t embracing perceived risk as a counterpoint to our natural risk aversion you probably aren’t going far enough or fast enough.

Most successful leaders have not only fought for it, they have thought for it too

3. Has a safety net where good people’s jobs are cut when your lazy strategy misses

Often, the makers of strategies are not the ones to suffer first when it doesn’t work

#redundancies, #downsizing, #rightsizing, #offshoring should not be the penalty for #lazystrategy

Lazy strategy is a bigger threat to jobs than robots

4. Doesn’t integrate innovation efforts back into the core

Innovation for too long has been about coloured post-it notes on walls. Idea generation is part of it but that is just called a ‘good start’. What environment are those ideas going back into on Monday morning? Do you have any of the 5 entrepreneurial ecosystem elements that actually correlate to corporate innovation performance?

We need to innovate how we innovate

What video do you make one early morning whilst waiting for the Darlinghurst Barista to brew up a special cup of corporate courage? What video do you make when you know there are going to be heaps of redundancies caused by lazy strategy? What video do you make  when you couldn’t give a stuff about anything but the message -not the look, not the hair, not the camera and not the traffic going under the flyover. Make a stand peeps – say no to lazy strategy.

It’s gonna take something…