superior strategies

Is ‘profit today’ the only objective of your business?

Ask a businessman what his main objective is, and you’ll invariably get the same response: ‘profit’. But this can be misdirected thinking - or worse. It may endanger the survival of the business itself. Getting profit today could undermine the business of the future.

Objectives are needed in every area where performance and results directly and vitally effect the survival and success of the business. These are two areas that effect every decision of the business and decide what it means to manage a business. They also spell out the results that the business should aim at and what is needed to work effectively towards them.

Every business needs to set multiple objectives, whatever the type of business, economic circumstance, business size and so forth. Here are 8 good ones; market standing, innovation, productivity, resources, profitability, manager performance and development, staff performance and attitude, public responsibility.

The first 5 are economic in character and the last 3 are intangible. This latter group are as important as the first 5 because if they are neglected any business would result in a tangible loss in performance in the first 5 areas.

As business is in fact a community its performance is dependent on the performance of human beings. Thus managers must attend to turning such intangibles into tangible and practical principles and values that are measurable such exceptional performance is achieved.

So profit is in there, but it’s not even top of the list. Should your business re-examine its objectives? Could another look at how you measure yourself improve your profit in the future?

See you soon

Andrew

For further information download FREE “How to Create and Exploit a UNIQUE STRATEGIC POSITION for Your Business”

What allows strategic innovators to predict the future is their reliance on measures of BOTH ‘strategic’ health AND ‘financial’ health of their businesses.

By adding strategic measures people it’s possible to get a couple of really powerful indicators:

1. An early warning system that allows them to question things before a crisis occurs, AND
2. A means of identifying new unique strategic positions to sustain growth.

The list of strategic health measures is long, they may include; customer satisfaction, market share, changes in the industry and the company’s fit with the changing environment, distributor and supplier feedback, employees morale, strength of company culture, innovation and new products in the pipe line.

Now if we are in agreement that these pretty fundamental measures tell us a lot about business survival and success, a simple question remains to be answered, namely; what tools do we have that can help us do the job of finding superior strategies – and if we want to go further with this – how good are they anyway?

I’ll tell you in my next post

Best wishes

Good morning! Hope your New Year is going well for you.

Last time we looked at the phenomenal success of Apples’ iPhone strategy. If you remember I mentioned that I’d go a little deeper and answer the question: “What does it take to develop a unique strategic position?”

Well, you may be surprised to know, research that we’ve gained from working with hundreds of companies over the past 10 years, shows that all successful superior strategies share the same underlying principles – despite their surface differences.

My argument is that by understanding these basic principles, any director, manager or business owner can use them to design a successful strategy.

And here’s another observation…

If you’ve ever looked closely at strategic innovators, you will have noticed that formulating successful strategies is a never-ending job. Just because companies like Easy Jet or Tescos have superior strategies today it doesn’t mean to say that they will be successful tomorrow!

Far from it! Tomorrow’s success is dependent on a strategy that will be superior in tomorrow’s market; and to continue to achieve that means applying the same fundamental principles yet again to craft another winning strategy once the current strategy has run its course.

Best wishes