A Strategy is a Guide for Making Decisions

If you were on an African safari or climbing through the Himalayas, you would take a guide with you. Your guide would provide options and explain the risks at each step on the adventure. However, you would make the final decision on what to do.

A strategy provides parameters to operate within, but you have to choose the final decisions within those parameters.

A business strategy has the following parameters. Choose them carefully for your organization, and then let them be your guide to make decisions within.

Questions for Establishing Your Business Strategy

1. Why does the organization exist? What is it's purpose?
2. What are the underlying values our members are expected to use in determining their behaviors?
3. What are the short-term and long-term financial objectives in terms of revenue, costs, and profits for our entire organization?
4. What is the primary decision driver for our organization? Fill in this blank: We want to be primarily a ____ organization. (Choose carefully what type of organization you want to primarily be. The choices are a customer-centric business, a product-centric business, a service-centric business, a technology centric business, a method of sale-centric business, or a method of distribution-centric business.)
5. What is the secondary decision driver for our organization? Fill in this blank: We want to be secondarily a ____ organization.
6. What is the value we will deliver and to whom are we delivering it to?

Once you (including you and the other members of the strategy development team) have clarified your answers to those six questions, you will have a strong sense of the parameters that will guide decisions on what your organization will do in the future. As you consider a certain tactic or planned activity, determine if it fits within the guidelines you've established in answering those questions.

As in taking on an adventure, a strategy serves as your guide. It doesn't tell you what to do, but provides you with paramenters within which to make decisions.