If you google the words ‘how to do strategy’ or 'what is business strategy' you will find a LOT of material ranging from articles that explains the various types of business strategies that exist (e.g. cost leadership, differentiation etc.) as well as long lists of generic strategic frameworks and tools.

The thing is, much of the strategic tools and processes that you find online are generic and incomplete. If you use those, you will probably end up creating a generic or incomplete strategy for your business. Incomplete strategies are useless because you can't do anything with them. And generic strategies won't get you anywhere either. They won't differentiate you from competitors. They won't help you attract talent to join your teams. So you don't want a generic strategy, you want the opposite.

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I have spent over a decade doing strategy work for big and small businesses, both from the inside (as an employee) and from the outside (as a consultant). I’ve seen good business strategies and I’ve seen bad business strategies. In the beginning I even produced bad business strategies myself, which was great to teach me what not to do.

The truth is, it’s not that complicated to create a good strategy for your business, and you certainly don’t need a decade of experience in corporate strategy or strategy consulting before you are able to produce something valuable.

But there are a few important things that I recommend you keep in mind...

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What strategy is

A strategy is like a statement of intent for your business. It's usually articulated in a way that sounds something along the lines of: ‘this is the reason-to-be of our business - now and in the future, and that is - at a high level - how we want to get there’.

This statement of intent sets the direction for your business, and it should be both inspirational and actionable. Inspirational so that your teams and partners get excited about working with your business, and so that your customers get excited about buying from your business. And it should be actionable enough that your teams are able to figure out how to get to that future and they feel empowered to use that as guidance on how to plan their work.

A good strategy is tailor-made for a specific business in the specific environment it is evolving in. If you are facing aggressive competition, or if the government is passing a law that requires you to change the standards of your product, you want your strategy to bear those challenges in mind. You cannot write a good strategy if you do not understand your business fully or if you do not understand the environment your business is a part of.

In all this, simplicity is key. If your strategy is too wordy or complicated for your target audience (your teams) to understand, to be inspired by or to implement, then you haven’t done your job well. The job of the people building the strategy - they can be a strategy lead or an Exec Team or even consultants - is to build a strategy that your teams, your partners and to some extent your customers feel inspired by and can work with.

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Why your business should have a visible strategy

A business that does not have a strategy is a business that does not make it clear where it is headed. As a result, the business will operate in the here and now, leaving itself at risk of being governed by whatever what feels most urgent rather than what is fundamentally important for its long-term growth. Teams will feel stretched in various directions depending on the emergency of the day and customer relationships are at risk of remaining short-term and transactional because they are also focusing on the here and now.

This will lead to confusion and - in the longer term - frustration. People who work for companies that are not clear on what direction the company is going into or on what success looks like will grow weary of not knowing whether or how much their work is making an impact.

A business that has an unclear strategy won't be better off than a business who has no strategy. If you have an unclear strategy, you are leaving it to your teams to interpret what they think the strategy really is. They are bound to interpret this in different ways depending on their leaders, jobs and characters which means that different parts of the company will be aiming for different objectives.

Finally, having a strategy but not communicating it is just even worse than having no strategy. In the absence of formal guidance, not only will the teams in your business focus on whatever they think is best (rather than a common goal), a gap will be created between the leaders who set the strategy (and therefore know it exists) and everyone else. This is bound to create frustration among your teams.

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Your strategy should be simple yet convey enough information to empower your teams to act.

When you are building a strategy, remember that you are building something that is meant to be used. This is not a purely intellectual exercise. You should structure your message, clarify your ideas, and write in plain English. Do not write huge documents that no one will ever look at. Do not dilute your message with things that are not of utmost importance. Do not settle for a messy or half-baked message that is unclear for readers and viewers. Your job is to make it easy for people to feel inspired by and to use the strategy. If people are not inspired or if they don't know what to do with the strategy you've built, either you've recruited the wrong people or you need to get back to work.

Depending on your experience, your personality and your readings, you may think that a strategy is a one-line banger that galvanises everyone who reads it (Like the 'Just do it' From Nike). Or you may think that it should look like a very structured pyramid with many levels, starting from the vision at the top and cascading down into more and more precise guidance for your teams to follow, down to their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

I think the right answer is somewhere in the middle. And I also think the answer will vary depending on the size of your company and how much the people at the top want to shape the work of their teams rather than step back and ask them to shape it themselves.

In big businesses, a simple and effective strategy can be made out of three layers which I describe below. If you want to add layers, do so with caution. Bear in mind that the more layers you add, the more your strategy will look like a 'pile of stuff' that your teams will struggle engage with rather than a tool that is meant to be easily actionable for them. Also, the more detail you put in your strategy, the more micro-managed your teams will feel. Stay at the inspirational and 'actionable-enough' level. Leave the detail for your teams to figure out.

With that in mind...

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The first layer is purely inspirational. It is your vision.

The vision is set by the CEO with the support of their Executive team and is there to share the long-term direction of the business with their teams and with the world.

This is the element of the strategy that existing and potential employees, customers and partners connect with on a deep-level. It is one or two sentences that state(s) your reason to be. It should be phrased in such a way that people immediately think ‘I want to work with this business’ or ‘This is not for me’ as they read or hear it. As such, you almost need to write the vision for your business with your guts rather than your head, and it should not change too often or you will confuse people with your changes in direction.

Remember: it is okay for people to not like your vision if you do not consider them to be part of your target audience. If you try to please everyone, you are going to produce a generic vision made out of buzzwords that don’t mean anything. It will be unconvincing and therefore uninspiring to the people who want to convince.

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The second layer brings your vision to life. It is made out of strategic goals, which are both inspirational and actionable.

Strategic goals should be set by the top of the organisation, usually the Executive Team, with a clear view of who ‘owns’ them - usually the members of the Executive Team whose teams will be the most involved in delivering work that is relevant to the goal.

Your strategic goals should give your teams clarity on how the Executive team wants the business to achieve its long-term vision.

Your strategic goals should be set sufficiently far in the future that you are able to make them about delivering really ambitious progress, and they should be close enough that you need to get cracking now on delivering them if you want to achieve them.

Your strategic goals should be ambitious - to further inspire your target audience - and practical - to show that you are serious about actually delivering the vision you have set for yourself. You should probably not have more than 5 strategic goals. If you have 6+ goals, your teams will not remember them - or they'll remember just the one that is most relevant to their work - and your business will disperse its efforts and/or not work collaboratively.

Basically, you want to set goals that make your employees proud at the idea of contributing to their delivery, that indicate to your customers that you have understood and prioritised their needs, and that generate excitement among your partners at the idea of working with you.

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The third layer is the ambition that sits behind your strategic goals.

Having a vision and a few strategic goals is valuable because they give your teams a sense of the direction you are setting for the company.

As a leadership team, you should also endeavour to give your teams enough detail on what you put behind each of the strategic goals both so they understand the intent you are setting clearly and so they can actually do practical work off the back of those goals. If you don't give that little extra detail, it's like you're sharing complex ideas with one or two words on a post-it, expecting people to imagine the complex ideas that are in your head just by reading the post-it. It's not going to work.

Don't give too much detail though or you'll be robbing your teams from having the space to be ambitious and creative in planning their own work. Give them just enough ideas and detail for them to start getting a sense of the kind of work you're inviting them to do to deliver those goals.

The owner of the strategic goal is the person responsible for ensuring that an ambitious yet realistic narrative is articulated for the goal they ‘own’. This is not a long list of projects (that comes later, during the business planning efforts), it resembles more something like two or three well-written and compelling paragraphs.

One of the best ways to do this is for the owner of each strategic goal to work with their teams to build a narrative that is based off of the intent and ideas shared by the Executive Team when they were setting the goals at a high level. When doing that kind of work, you are also creating an opportunity for the ideas of the Executive Team to be tested with some of the people who will be delivering the goal: maybe the Executive Team was too ambitious, maybe it was not ambitious enough. This is a feedback loop, and the owner of the strategic goal is responsible for making sure that both sides to the story (the Executive team and the lower-levels of the organisation) feel inspired and empowered by the narrative they land on.

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Building a business strategy is not a purely intellectual exercise, it's a collaborative business exercise. You should not try and build the perfect strategy while sitting in your ivory tower surrounded by a bunch of really smart consultants. The strategy you're building should inspire and empower your teams into taking action, so they need to be involved in the process. Be mindful of who to engage and when, how to get people to think with the right mindset and in the right context, how to make sure that the output is practical enough for teams to plan their work off the back of it.