Strategy Bites Back
It’s Far More and Less Than You Ever Imagined
Editorial Review
The Malcolm Baldrige Award is given annually to companies that have extremely high quality. In 1990, the Wallace Company, a family-run distributor of pipes and valves in Houston won in the small business category. Unfortunately, glowing reviews about the company didn’t transfer into results. Quality alone wasn’t the recipe for success. The award did nothing to overcome a severe downturn in the oil business, and a loss of focus by the management team. A few years later the company was in bankruptcy. Many companies fail like this. They merely focus on one or two issues, whether it was quality, price wars, cost reduction, etc, that they fail to see the whole picture. They let urgent, but often less important things, grab their full attention. They face the future with the exalted courage of a fireman. But what they really lack is the mind of a general. Strategizing, planning and weighing the options are the tasks a general doe. Strategy is what most failing businesses lack. A strategy is not a document, but a management tool. A strategy should not be placed on a shelf or a drawer, but turned into actions.
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Wisdom to Share
There will be some areas where competitors can beat you and some areas where they can't. They may hurt you in the short run, but they'll ultimately either go out of business or get smart.
The strategic part of this equation is figuring out where you can win so you can concentrate all of your resources there.
Ideally, you shouldn’t go head to head with any competitor. That’s a recipe for failure. If they’re selling on price, perhaps you should sell on quality.
Understanding your capabilities is a key concept in formulating a sound strategy. You should have reliable measurements of your company’s strengths and weaknesses.
It's impossible to plan for the future without assumptions and hypotheses about future events. Strategy is about planning for the future. If the world would stay the same, you could just plan once and then forget about it.
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