Transcript of the video:

It’s about choices to do some things and not others. And, in fact what we would say is it's five choices. Strategy is about making five key choices. If you make those choices and make them well you'll have a strategy that will help your company or your organization be as good as it can be.

I would argue that if you don't make these choices you might get lucky, and in the short term maybe because you're in a great industry it'll be okay but you won't have sustained excellence of any sort. And the worst thing for you is chances are somebody else is going to make those five choices in your industry and they will beat you. That's as simple as that. They will beat you.

So, if you don't make these choices you're living in the hopes that nobody else does and so you not making the choices will get you through. So one of the choices just quickly and then I will then I will give an example of each to illustrate them.

What is our winning aspiration? So what is our aspiration for winning in this market? What are we trying to accomplish? If you don't specify that, you have no objective function.

Where will we play? Sort of where in the potential market place will we essentially plop our chips down and play there, rather than anywhere else?

How will we win? So where we've chosen to play, how will we create a better value equation for the customer who we are selling to than anybody else in our business?

What capabilities do we have to have in place to win the way we want to win, in the place we're seeking to play, to meet our aspirations?

And then, lastly, what management systems do we have to have in place that will ensure that we're building those capabilities, and maintaining those capabilities on an ongoing basis, so that we win where we've chosen to play so that we meet our aspirations.

Those are the five questions of strategy. And I will say that I think strategy would be absolutely dead simple, dead simple, if you could simply answer each of those five questions independently. Sit down and dole them out to a group; you do one, two, three, four, five; that would make strategy dead easy.

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The only thing that makes it a little bit hard is that those five choices have to fit together and reinforce one another. That's the only thing that makes it hard, which means you can't lock and load on one and say I'm done with that, and I can think about the others. That is why by the way, figuring out in advance your mission statement down to the last word, and then locking and loading on that is a phenomenally bad idea. It has to be done all the time, but it is a phenomenally bad, bad idea. Why? Well, it’s because there may be nowhere to play or how to win that's consistent with that. And so you have to be open to the notion of modifying that as you take into account the others.

This video was filmed as part of the Strategy Expert Speaker series on February 6, 2018.