Three golden rules for creating great strategies

One of the constants in my last 25 years of work has been a focus on strategy. Business strategy, IT strategy, digital strategy, occasionally marketing strategy, and of course these days AI strategy. I help write and review over 100 strategies per year. The way the word strategy is used in business is very ambiguous. In fact, I would argue that it has ceased to be a word, and is more of a specialist punctuation mark, that people put after other words to make them sound important. And then there is the great crime of the mission/ vision articulation of strategy which seems to be very unhelpful to me. I know the word passionate gets sickeningly and disingenuously overused in business, but I do feel genuinely passionate about strategy. If I could have one hope for my corporate life, it would be to move the ball forward just a little on strategy. I wrote and self-published a short book on it “The Essence of Strategy” and have collaborated with lots of Gartner colleagues on the topic in the last 20 years. Here are the top three of my golden rules for creating great strategies: RULE 1: SUCCESS-FOCUSED. A strategy must connect the demand and supply sides. The demand side is the how the enterprise that this strategy is in service of will win/ succeed. The supply side is how the domain of the strategy will evolve to meet that demand side need/opportunity. For example an IT strategy for a business should have a demand side, which summarizes where the business will play, how it will win, what capabilities it needs, and how IT will help with that. The supply side summarizes how the IT estate (services, apps, infrastructure, talent, partners, structure) etc. will evolve to support that demand side narrative. RULE 2: REAL DECISIONS. Everything in the strategy should be a decision between valid alternatives. If possible communicate everything as strategy (what we will do/ ways we will do it) – anti-strategy (what we won’t do/ ways we won't do it) pairs. Anything that does not have a valid alternative that you won’t do should be kicked out of the strategy. RULE 3: FUTURE-FOCUSED. A strategy should be (mainly) about the future. Looking forward. Not too encumbered by, or apologizing for/ explaining the past. A good heuristic is 10% about the past, 20% about the present, 70% about the future. Links to a Gartner document (behind paywall) with a few more rules and details, and the book mentioned, in the comments below. #unthink #unask #unlearn #strategy