A Plan Is Not a Strategy

Plans are quite comforting, It's about the resources you are going to spend. It's on the cost side of businesses.

Who controls your cost? You control the cost, You are the customer! It's comfortable because you control them.

A strategy specifies an outcome you wish to achieve, like attracting customers to buy your product, enough of it to give you a profit.

But you don't control the customers. They decide, not you and that's a harder trick to allure them.

This is where you put yourself out and say what you belive will happen and wait for reality to kick in.

Startegy will have angst associated with it. It'll make you somewhat nervous.

You can't prove in advance that your strategy will succeed.

Accept the fact that you can't know for sure.

Lay out the logic of your strategy clearly.

Keep it short - ideally 1 page, do not complicate.

And if something you say is in the logic that would have to be true for it to work is not working out quite the way you hoped.

Then tweak it, what you want is a mechanism of tweaking it, toning it, and refining it so it gets better and better as you go along.

1. here's where we're choosing to play.
2. here's how we're choosing to win.
3. here the capabilities we need to have in place.
4. here are the management systems.

And that's why it's going to achieve its goals, this aspiration that we have.

Then you lay out the logic, what must be true for that all to work out the way we hope.

Go do it, and watch and tweak as you go along.