If we asked the following about your company how would you answer:

• In your company, who is responsible for creating your strategy?
• Which comes first, the strategy or the tactics?
• How do you come up with your strategies?
• If we were looking for your strategy, where would we find it?

If you find these tough to answer you might want to be careful, your competitors might have answers and blow right by you.

I have found that in most small businesses I have worked for and with that the strategy being followed is not very apparent or conscious within the organization. And maybe even worse there is no process to create it, evolve it, share it and measure and monitor its execution.

So, how to proceed. I believe strongly in incrementalism, start and then improve continously instead of trying to be perfect in the beginning. In addition strategy development is a dynamic process and not one that follows a precise linear process.

Most of us that started or lead a business had a clear understanding of an unmet customer need and set out to meet it.

Four Step Process 

1. So the first thing we must do is be continously scanning our environment for unmet needs, changes in economic and non-economic factors.
2. The second thing we then do is to discuss and develop potential strategies we could follow to take advantage of the environmental factors we have scanned.
3. Thirdly we then evaluate how well these new strategies fit with our current organization, customers, markets and resources.
4. Finally we evolve the strategies based on the process (including sometimes doing nothing) and start all over again.

This process can be formal or informal depending on the size of your organization and the resources you can apply.

I would bet 10 to 1 that you do this currently but were not conscious of doing so. My point here is to make this process more conscious so that we can become consciously competent.  Most of us once we are aware of something can then improve how well we do something. (Like Golf Lessons)

To answer my initial question, ‘Who’s Responsible?’ Of course the CEO is responsible to make sure there is an effective strategy and it is executed but we are well past the day when the CEO should do so in a vacuum.

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