What strategic choices need to be made?
Strategic choices define the set of choices you and your leadership team MUST make to define the identity of your business, the fundamentals of why the business exists, where and who it serves and how it will define and deliver superior value. A complete set of integrated strategic choices is how innovations become a business, and a business wins with its customers for the benefits of all that it serves.
Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.
Michael Porter, Engineer / Professor, Havard Business School
Purpose of Strategic choices
The purpose of making strategic choices is to decide what is the aspiration or impact the business desires to make, where it can best achieve that success, and how it will be accomplished, implemented and sustained. Hence the choices break out into:
It is the synergy between these choices that defines what success for a business looks like, where and how it will be achieved. StrategyCAD Strategy Co-pilot is specifically designed to help you make a compelling, achievable, complete and mutually supportive set of strategic choices that represents your integrated blueprint for success.
Making strategic choices is the foundation of effective strategic leadership. It recognizes that leadership is more than goal setting, activity planning or financial forecasting. Strategy defines where the business can win and how it can win in that environment. It requires an understanding of the environment(s) the business operates, potential alternative environments, the customers and needs of the customers in those environments and how to win with those customers today and in the future.
Strategic choice models
Strategic choice models and the thought leaders behind them.
There are a variety of Strategic choice models. In this section you can see the StrategyCAD Unified choices model that unifies the choice models from other Strategy experts and thought leaders. These choice models are defined in the adjacent tabs.
An overview of Strategic choices
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What Aspirations represent success?
Aspirations provide the basis of excellence and focus. More . .
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Where do you play, compete or contribute?
Describes the configuration choices of the playing field / environment where the business can contribute or compete (most) successfully. More . .
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How will you succeed?
Describes the multiple related choices including resources, capabilities, delivery capability and more for how the business will deliver superior value to win with its target market.
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How will you manage and sustain your strategy?
Describes the systems for implementing and sustaining the strategy and sustaining relevance and competitive advantage.
For each choice there are a variety of sub-choices to be made. Obvious inclusions are channels used to promote, sell, and support the offerings, the products/services necessary to meet customer’s needs, which customer functional, emotional, and social needs the business satisfies and so on. Lack of strategy methodology along with deficient visual cues means significant potential for overlooking important choices or sub-choices, resulting in incomplete or ineffective strategic thinking and action.
The Lafely and Martin 5 choice model is described in their best-selling book Playing to Win: How Strategy really works, 2013, Harvard Business Review Press. The five choices are:
These choices are integrated into the StrategyCAD Strategic choices model and described in subsequent chapters.
The Four (4) choice model is described in the book Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases, Wiley and Sons, 2020, Prof Jeffrey H. Dyer; Prof Paul Godfrey; Assoc Prof Robert Jensen; Assoc Prof David J. Bryce The four choices are:
These choices are integrated into the StrategyCAD Strategic choices model and described in subsequent chapters.
References
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Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, 2013, A.G. Lafely and Roger L. Martin |
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Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases 3rd Edition, 2016, Jeff Dyer, Paul C. Godfrey, Robert J. Jensen, David J. Bryce |
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Understanding the four key questions that drive business strategy and help a company determine how to succeed in a particular industry or competitive marketplace, Brigham Young University |
