Business strategy includes the areas of growth strategy, marketing and brand strategy, sales strategy, as well other areas of strategic thinking. Within growth strategy, we include both normal business growth and inorganic growth, namely mergers and acquisitions. Marketing strategy and sales strategy are many times discussed in unity, but are completely different in nature. Business strategy is is often conducted during a yearly strategic planning session or workshop, usually conducted in a 3-5 day off site conference space with executives and key stakeholders, both inside and external to the business. Sales strategy includes channel strategy, distribution strategy, and business development. Marketing strategy includes advertising strategy, go-to-market strategy, as well as SEO strategy.
Strategic thinking of modern business organizations has been built upon a platform of military strategists since the beginning of organized warfare. Sun Tzus thoughts about the factor of terrain, if we were to take that into the context of companies competing today, translates to markets, industry structures, value propositions, and competitive forces. Sun Tzu spoke about indirect strategies when he said winning without fighting is the highest of skill on the battlefield. Sun Tzu preached to know and attack the enemys strategy. In Sun Tzus Art of War, he wrote about five fundamental factors in military strategy and each of these factors relates to a popular concept of business strategy.
Today, there are two primary schools of thought around strategic management. In organizational configuration, the organization takes on behaviors based on adaptation to business surroundings. Henry Mintzberg proposes for an organization, bottom-ups process to drive the strategy development process that adheres to organizational configuration. Henry Mintberg also advocates a transformation of business practices, where management recognizes the need and has the ability to conduct top-down business operations transformation.
A critical activity used in strategic planning is scenario planning. An important task in the scenario planning framework is choosing the primary axes of uncertainty after building a 2-axis scenario map. Oftentimes, the scenario planning process is performed in a workshop environment, where key stakeholders, c-level members, subject matter experts, and externaladvisors, are gathered in a 3 day off-site location to decide on various future state scenarios. Scenario planning techniques is also called scenario thinking and scenario planning analysis. Scenario planning is used to help businesses plan for and make flexible long term strategic plans.
Business strategy development has evolved through 5 key stages since the early 1900s. Today, the strategic development theme is on integrating strategic planning and execution with a stress on the key concepts of core competencies, strategy planning and execution, and balance scorecard analysis. Much of corporate strategy is also hinged on ideas in the 1970s, where the core theme was around thinking strategically to beat competition and the business frameworks of alternative strategies, portfolio analysis, and the BCG Growth Share Matrix emerged. Shifts in strategic mindset represent an ever evolving, new thought leaders, and emergence of disruptive technologies and changes. Business strategy development started with a focus on financial planning in the 1950s, moving to sustainable business planning in the 1960s, to strategic planning in the 1970s and eventually to a focus on strategic management in the present day.
To create a robust business strategy, organizations all must follow a strategy development process beginning with a clear set of beliefs around its business positioning and identified strategic challenges. Proper strategy development involves more than a focus on maximizing profitability. Strategy is about value innovation, strategy is about selectivity, and strategy is about business agility. The next steps include defining what the future state vision of the company is and then going into the details of planning how to get to that state. To properly gauge and analyze your strategic challenges, you must begin with a comprehensive current state understanding of your situation.
Business Strategies
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