Is strategies important to professionals?

July 08, 2017

This article was written when I faced to first strategic planning, thinking, management activity of Personal Progress Development session.

Strategy is a word with many meanings and all of them are relevant and useful to those who are charged with setting strategy for their corporations, businesses, or organizations. Some definitions of strategy as offered by various writers spanning the years 1962 to 1996 are briefly reviewed below.

“Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., author of Strategy and Structure (1962), the classic study of the relationship between an organization’s structure and its strategy, defined strategy as “the determination of the basic long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources for carrying out these goals.” (As we will see later, it is the allocation of resources that ties the civilian use of strategy to its military origins.)

When we work in industry “strategies” is very important. In some organizations there are divisions called “strategic management”.
Why strategies are important?

Here are five reasons why strategy plays such an important part of any company’s success.

1. Planning – Creating and tracking progress against an annual operating plan is an essential management tool for any company. What is often missing is the relationship these plans have to the future. Too often annual operating plans are created from the rear view mirror. What happened last year and where should we go in the coming year? These are all good intentions. However, without a clear picture of what you want the future to look like, it will always be more reactive than proactive. A well-articulated 3 to 5-year long term view of the company should serve to inform the annual operating plan. The annual plan then becomes the stepping stone toward the achievement of the longer term goals.

2. Strengths and Weaknesses – At first glance this seems too obvious and you are saying to yourself, “Of course we know what our strengths and weaknesses are!” We cannot disagree. No one knows your business better than you. On the other hand, are you leveraging strengths (competitive advantages) and do you have plans to close capability gaps in your organization (weaknesses)? Strategy creates a higher level of awareness and provides greater focus on activities that will make the organization more successful.

3. Skills & Knowledge – If you know where you want to take your business over the long term, you will have a much better idea of the kinds of capabilities you will need to achieve your goals. Strategy defines and drives decisions in organizational design. Therefore, by proactively pursuing new skills and knowledge, you prepare the organization for the intended future state and your odds of success increase.

4. Resource allocation – One thing is clear about any company, large and small—resources are finite. We wish they were infinite, but that will never be the case. Strategy is about making choices. What products, services and markets will be a part of the future and what we should not do? These types of decisions are critical to ensuring that limited resources are being deployed to the most promising opportunities that will provide the greatest return.

5. Environmental Scan – Too many CEOs don’t take the time to truly know the external environment that can have a positive or negative impact on performance. This is not to say that leaders are not in tune with their customers, or not aware of their competition.
There is a huge opportunity for CEOs/Owners to excel in performance with a well-crafted strategy. Bottom line, execution without strategy is aimless. Let us know what you think of these five reasons strategy is important and share with us some of your own experiences. We would love to hear from you.

We practiced strategies using “Barter Puzzle Game”.
It as this way. There are four big pictures. They cut into same amount of pieces. Then they put into four different bags and take randomly some pieces from a bag and put them randomly to other bags. Ultimately each bag was with 76 pieces and about 10 pieces among them are not relevant to picture. We have to puzzle the image using pieces in our bag and pieces in other bags. We have to exchange pieces among other groups using strategies. Different teams used different strategies to that.
We learned about how to apply strategies, time management, to do discussions with other parties, presentation skills.

Why strategy is important? - Robynne Berg-Strategy & Leadership Consultant.

To become a talented professional expert if software development industry those skills are necessary.