Lots of people – most notably academics and consultants – tend to talk about strategy as if it’s some kind of high-brain scientific methodology. 

We come from a different school of thought. That strategy is a living, breathing, totally dynamic game. It’s fun – and fast.  And it’s alive. Forget the arduous number crunching and data grinding that “gurus” say you have to go through to get strategy right. Forget the scenario planning, yearlong studies, and 100-plus page reports. They’re time consuming and expensive, and you just don’t need them. In real life, strategy is very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.

How?

► First, come up with a big “a-ha” for your business – a smart, realistic, relatively fast way to gain sustainable competitive advantage. We don’t know any better way to come up with this big a-ha than by answering a set of questions we call The Five Slides, an assessment process that should take a group of informed people somewhere between a day and a month.

► Second, put the right people in the right jobs to drive the big a-ha forward. To drive your big a-ha forward, you need to match certain kinds of people with commodity businesses and a different type entirely with high value-add businesses. We don’t like to pigeonhole, but the facts are, you get a lot more bang for your buck when strategy and skills fit.

► Third, relentlessly seek out the best practices to achieve your big a-ha, whether inside or out, adapt them, and continuously improve them. Strategy is unleashed when you have a learning organization, where people thirst to do everything better every day. They draw on best practices from anywhere, and push them to ever-higher levels of effectiveness. You can have the best big a-ha in the world, but without this learning culture in place, any sustainable competitive advantage will not last.

Strategy, then, is simply finding the big a-ha and setting a broad direction, putting the right people behind it, and then executing with an unyielding emphasis on continuous improvement.

To go deeper and get more specific, you can take a look at the five topics of this section: Making Strategy, Best Practices, Going Global, M&A, and Growth.