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What is strategy

Summary of postings

What is strategy	Steven Joyce	24 Nov 04
Re: What is strategy	Murali Santhanam Thiruvazhi	24 Nov 04
Re: What is strategy	John Shenton	8 Nov 05
Re: What is strategy	Richard Llewellyn	24 Nov 04
Re: What is strategy	Steven Joyce	25 Nov 04
Re: What is strategy	Kevin Bush	3 Sep 08

Details of postings

What is strategy	Steven Joyce	24/11/2004 12:48
What is the difference between a strategy and a plan? Can a business have more than one strategy? If a business has a strategy why does every function need one - surely everything else is a plan?

+ Re: What is strategy	Murali Santhanam Thiruvazhi	24/11/2004 14:17
A Strategy is a macro picture of how we would address a new market, a new opportunity or a new product or service. It provides direction. Strategies normally are required when very little info is available. Eg, Scenario Planning is a tool used to evolve a strategy for a specific organisation direction. A plan on the contrary, is a set of steps for each area of the strategy that would address Customers, Internal processes, Financial Outcome and People. It is a definitive step by step approach in achieving the strategy. The Plan can have goals and milestones.
++ Re: What is strategy	John Shenton	08/11/2005 16:27
A strategy is a long term view of where a business is NOW and where it is aiming to GET TO within a given time frame. The key words being "long term". This is not to say that a strategy cannot be modified as time progresses, and given that the correct monitors and controls are in place, it cannot be changed. A plan is one of many that should all integrate to meet the needs of the business strategey, much like a JIGSAW puzzle fits together to make up the whole picture. There is by defintion therefore ONE strategey and SEVERAL plans, all of which can be measured as a set of clearly defined objectives, and changed to meet the needs of the business, over time.
++ Re: What is strategy	Richard Llewellyn	24/11/2004 14:25
This is a common question and the experience of a long career in international industry strategy tells me it all comes down to the lexicon of your firm. The lexicon of the firm is part of corporate culture and it can be favourably influenced - so everybody speaks the same lanuage of the firm - by internal processes and communications. In the 80s and 90s I worked in corporate strategic planning for several blue chip UK-based groups. We had strategies, we had plans, and we had strategic planning teams. For years the strategies and plans were only in the minds of the chairman and/or CEO and were not communicated so they were not understood by those that were responsible for implementation. We came to realise that the main task we faced was to get our leaders to understand that the business world had become too complex, and was changing too quickly, for the head of the company to be well-informed enough to make the right decisions every time. To address our task we designed an integrated strategic planning process that involved managers from all key functions of the business. Implementation of the integrated strategic planning process resulted in a global strategic plan that had been built "bottom-up" by all relevant functions (and if you have any irrelevant functions ask yourself why!) and then endorsed "top-down" by the Board. Finally, we had a strategic plan that was created from the buy-in and inputs from the managers that built it and would implement it. And due to the collaborative inputs made to building the plan there were no "political" problems in communicating it and implementing it. Business problems, yes! But everybody had sight of the goal and how they would be participating in getting there. "Integrated" is the key word. Yes, a business can have more than one strategy and the usual way this comes about is in different strategies for different regions and or product groups. What you are integrating are the different functional and regional strategies that combine to form corporate strategy. On culture and communications; the best tool we ever used was the scenario planning approach where we invited senior functional and regional leaders to engage in a moderated strategic conversation about the future business environment and that quickly achieved the purpose of participants using the same language and terms and understanding what each other meant when using terms like "strategy" and "plan". I hope the foregoing is helpful and interesting. Let me know if you would like to follow up on any details.
+++ Re: What is strategy	Steven Joyce	25/11/2004 12:54
Thanks for both your comments -I agree with the definition of plan versus strategy - but remain unconvinced about an organisation having more than one strategy. Surely if you take the business has a strategy that sets direction and is fairly broad brush - then the rest of the work to support this is a plan. I would be interested in your comments - it will at least help me clarify my thinking
++++ Re: What is strategy	Kevin Bush	03/09/2008 14:33
Of course HR can have strategies. Strategies are the deliberate methods you use to achieve objectives/goals. For instance, your business may decide to move into new markets or develop new products,(business strategies) to maintain or grow market share(objectives/goals) so the HR objectives could be to re-skill internally and to recruit skilled talent from outside. In the first case, you have the options to select strategies like investing hard company cash in external expertise to develop staff, or developing internal masterclasses, or maybe using local colleges with government funding. In the second case, you may embark on a strategy of increasing awareness of your employer brand through targeted advertising so that talent is attracted, or you may decide to target niche skills through recruitment agencies or even undergraduate/graduate programmes with universities who offer appropriate courses. It pays to do some research on potential feasibility before jumping in.Once strategies are selected, you then plan out the nuts and bolts (Who,what,when,where,) of implementing them. These are just hypothetical examples but I hope they illustrate the difference between a strategy and a plan.