How Can You Think More Strategically?
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts
"To say he's just not a strategic thinker is a cop out. What it means is you don't know how to help that person Think more strategically, or it might mean you haven't thought strategically enough as an organization."
— Mike Goldman
Core Purpose (Why)
- Establish a deep understanding of why your organization exists.
- Guides decision-making and aligns with your mission and values.
- Not just a goal but a way of living and working every day.
BHAG (Man On The Moon Goal)
- Set a long-term, ambitious goal (10-15 years).
- Provides clear direction and long-term vision.
- Communicate regularly to promote strategic thinking.
Sandbox for Business Expansion
- Define the scope of business expansion for the next three years.
- Create a vivid vision of the organization's future.
- Beyond numerical goals, encompasses the look, feel, and culture.
True Meaning of Strategy
- Deliberate selection of distinct activities for unique value.
- Prioritizes differentiation over competing on the same dimensions.
Knowing Your Competition
- Identify competitors, market positions, and white spaces.
- Build and own your desired marketplace for long-term strategy.
SWOT Analysis's Three Uses
- Traditional: Identify internal strengths and weaknesses.
- Situational: Consider external factors like market trends.
- Scenario Planning: Analyze various scenarios for strategic insights.
Thanks for listening!
Apply for a free coaching call with me
Get a Free Gift ⬇️
🆓 The limitless organization short video course
Connect with me
www.instagram.com/mikegoldmancoach/
www.facebook.com/mikegoldmancoach/
www.www.linkedin.com/in/mgoldman10/
I invite you to assess your team In all these areas by taking an online 30-question assessment for both you and your team at
-
He's just not a strategic thinker. Do you ever hear that? Do you ever say it? I don't buy it. I don't believe it. I don't think that 35 years ago, his mom gave birth to an eight pound, two ounce tactical thinker. I don't believe it. I think strategic thinking can be taught. I also think strategic thinking happens more in a more strategic environment where there is more strategic thinking going on.
So I want to talk about a few ways to make sure that you are truly leveraging the tools that are available, the opportunities that are available so that you and the people around you can think more strategically to say he's just not a strategic thinker is a cop out. What it means is you don't know how to help that person think more strategically or it might mean you haven't.
Thought strategically enough as an organization. So there's a whole bunch of people that don't have the ability to think any more than tactically, any more than solving the problem in front of their face because you haven't provided the foundation to allow people to think strategically. So let me share some ideas that I hope help make sure that you and the people around you have the ability to think more strategically.
And I'm going to share three things. Number one, I'll give you a kind of a brief overview of the three. Number one is I want to talk about your own vision and strategy you used to help guide decision making because the clearer your vision and strategy is, the more people can think within that vision and within that strategy and think more quote unquote.
Strategically. So number one, do you have a vision and strategy? That's clear. Number two, when you talk strategy, do you even know what you're talking about? Do you understand the definition of strategy? Have you built a differentiating strategy? That people could work within and drive towards. And then third, I want to share a tool that's typically thought of as more tactical, but a way to be more strategic about the SWOT tool.
So number one, do you have a vision and strategy to kind of guide strategic thinking? Number two, do you really use that word strategy in the right way? And are you being strategic? And number three, how could we use a simple tool like the SWOT analysis to help us think more strategically?
Okay, so let's talk about the first one. Do you have a crystal clear vision and strategy to help guide decision making? And I want to talk about two different timeframes. That's important to be clear about. What is the long term almost never changing vision. And the other one is the three year vision and strategy.
Do you have a core purpose for your organization. Core purpose is not some nice sounding, you know, beautiful McKinsey written shareholder value. We care about everything and nobody and it doesn't mean anything to anybody, but it looks good on a plaque on the wall. No, a purpose is your why, do you have an understanding of why you exist so that when someone's having a difficult day, they can kind of look up and go, yeah, today kind of sucked, but let's remember why we're doing this.
Do you have a why that helps you make decisions when you are deciding between two different alternatives, strategic alternatives? What would your purpose tell you? Which alternative is more consistent with your purpose or with your why? For Disney, the why may be happiness. For Starbucks, it's a third place.
It's not home. It's not work. Starbucks. It's this third place. It's not a cup of coffee. What is your why? What is your purpose? And if you don't have a why, if your why is about making money, and that's not your why, that's a benefit you get from working towards your why. And a why is not a goal that you achieve.
A why is something you live every day. So if you don't have a purpose that you're living every day, it's gonna be harder for your folks to think strategically because they don't understand why you're doing what you're doing, what your bigger mission is. You need an understanding of that.
Number two, do you have a 10 to 15 year, big, hairy, audacious goal, a flag on top of the mountain, a man on the moon kind of goal, which is, I don't know how we're getting there, but man, wouldn't it be cool if we did that?
It's not enough to know you're climbing a big mountain. You have to know which mountain you're climbing. While your purpose is something you never achieve, but you live every day, your big hairy audacious goal is absolutely something you are setting out to achieve. It may take 10 or 15 years, you may never get there, but it tells you what mountain you're climbing.
And again, if you don't have that long-term, almost never changing vision around core purpose, around a big hairy audacious goal, and you're complaining your people aren't thinking strategically. You're hobbling them. You're hurting their ability to think strategically because they're not sure where they're going long term.
And if you're not sure where you're going long term, the only thing you can do is try to make great short term decisions, which is the epitome of being tactical. So if you have a clear purpose, a clear reason why, a clear big hairy audacious goal, that's been communicated out to the organization. Not once or twice, but Every week, every month, every quarter, it's being communicated.
If you have those things, congrats, communicate it more. If you don't have those things, that's where you start. Your people are not going to think strategically until you have that clarity of vision. Now let's go to the three year vision and strategy. Three year vision and strategy is made up of a number of things.
Number one, and what most companies have is numbers, right? Where do you see yourself in three years from a profit standpoint, from a gross margin standpoint, from a net profit or EBITDA standpoint? So what are the numbers?
What sandbox are you going to be playing in three years from now? What I mean by a sandbox is what products and services will you be delivering to your clients three years from now? Will there be additional products, additional services? Well, some of the products and services you have today not exist three years from now. So within a sandbox, number one, it's products and services.
Number two, It's geographies. Are you playing in the Northeast United States now, but your goal is to be national? Are you playing nationally, but your goal is to be international?
Number three within the sandbox is what distribution channels will you be leveraging three years from now? Right now, do you just sell brick and mortar, but you plan to sell via the web right now? Do you just sell through your own salesforce, but you plan to sell through a more independent salesforce moving forward?
Are you a software company that sells yourself, but your three year vision is to work with third party integrators and have them bring you in to opportunities. So within this three year vision, what are your targets? The numbers? What sandbox are you playing in? And what are your big chess moves? What are your key thrusts?
Your big three year initiatives. Who do you need to be? What do you need to become? What do you need to accomplish? What are the two, three, four most important things you need to accomplish? Over the next three years
and without those three things your targets, your sandbox, your big chess moves or three year initiatives without understanding those things again
you're hobbling your team's ability to think strategically because they don't know where you're going. The last thing with a three year vision that I really like is there's a an author named Cameron Herold who wrote a book called Vivid Vision And Vivid Vision is more of a three dimensional vision of the future and he uses three years and I like three years, which is more than just the numbers and the big chess moves and the sandbox.
It's what do you want your company to look like, feel like, smell like, taste like three years from now? Walking through the hallways, what are things going to look like? What does it sound like? What are your clients saying about you? What are your employees saying about you? What's the media saying about you? What's your brand all about? Creating a vivid vision gives you a clear three dimensional view of your companies future.
So number one, and how we build this skill, this ability to think more strategically is to have a vision and strategy that help guide decision making. And within that, we talked about the almost never changing purpose, BHAG, and then we just talked about the three year vision. So that's number one. Do you have that vision and strategy?
Number two, let's talk about the true meaning of strategy. It's very hard for people to think strategically when there's not a clear definition of what strategy is, and strategy could be a time frame, strategy could be anything three years or beyond is strategy. But I think there's a better definition, the father of competitive strategy, Michael Porter.
And if you're watching on video, I'm looking up at my corkboard over my desk where I have Michael Porter's definition of strategy of competitive strategy and it's deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value. Say it one more time , it's deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.
So strategy is not so much a timeframe is it's a way of thinking it focuses not on trying to be better than our competition along all the same dimensions that they all compete upon because by the way, that's a race to commoditization. That's a race to the bottom. We're all just going to be great at everything.
And then what you wind up competing on is what you compete on price. And man, I hope you don't want to compete on price. So deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value means we've got to focus on our competitive differentiators, which means we've got to understand what are the different characteristics that the marketplace is going to evaluate us on.
Maybe one of them is price. Maybe it's level of service. Maybe it's how broad your assortment is. Maybe it could be the depth of your assortment. It could be the width of your assortment. It may be whether you focus on a specific industry versus being broad on industries.
It may be, you know, look at like Walmart versus a high end boutique. Is it about assortment and a low level of service or is it about a very narrow assortment, but a high level of service? What are the marketplace characteristics?
And then it's an understanding of your competition. Do you know who your competition is?
Do you know where they are? Along the continuum of all those different characteristics, does your team understand who they're competing with and can you go through each of the 8, 10, 12 characteristics of the market and score yourself? And score your competitors on a scale of one to five, so that when you do that, you have an understanding of where the white space is.
Or if you're a blue ocean strategy fan, where the blue ocean is, where could you play on a whole different playing field than your competition? What's going to differentiate you so that two or three years from now, your competition is all playing on one side of the field, but man, you're playing a whole different game.
It feels like you have no competition because no one's quite doing what you're doing. No one's delivering that unique mix of value from that different set of activities you have. So, what marketplace do you want to own three years from now? And then quarter by quarter, how are you going to get there. Again
the clear you could be in defining what strategy is. Number one, and then what's your strategy? How are you going to differentiate in the marketplace? And then over time, how are you driving to build that again if you're not clear on that, you're hobbling your people's ability to think strategically. Your quarterly priorities should not just be fixing problems that you want to fix over the next 90 days.
Your quarterly priorities, or what I like to call rocks, should be ones that drive you closer to owning that spot in the marketplace. So so far I've shared two things with you to help your folks think more strategically. Number one, having that long term almost never changing vision and then that three year vision and strategy.
Number two, do you really understand what strategy is and are you driving to a differentiated strategy? And number three is this tool called a SWOT analysis that we typically think of as being tactical. But, I want to share with you three different ways to use it. The first one being a bit more tactical, but three different ways to use the SWOT to help your folks think beyond just what's right in front of their face.
So, if you don't know what a SWOT is, it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Now let's talk about the traditional use. I'm going to talk about three uses of SWOT. One is traditional, one I'm going to call situational, and the third is scenario planning. So the traditional way to use SWOT, which by the way is a heck of a lot more strategic than most people think, even though we think of the SWOT as being tactical, is to say let's look at our business together and let's understand, number one, what are our strengths?
And number two, what are our weaknesses? When we talk about strengths and weaknesses, we take an internal view. A weakness is not, there's a recession on the way. That's external. A weakness may be, we're short staffed right now. A strength is not, our marketplace seems to be growing, or we've got some great acquisition targets out there.
A strength might be... we have a whole bunch of great clients that are willing to sing our praises. They're internal. And if I'm doing this with a leadership team, I typically have each member of the leadership team put on, you know, I'm a big fan of flip charts and post it notes, but put on a post it note.
What do they believe the top three strengths, internal strengths are in the organization. And what you want to do with those strengths is typically leverage those strengths. How can we leverage those strengths to be even stronger? And then what are the top three weaknesses, internal weaknesses? Weaknesses are things if they're priority weaknesses that we probably want to go fix.
Now, if you've got something you're weak in, but your plan is to be weak there, like we're high priced and that's been kind of a weakness to us, but our strategy is to be the highest price. You may not fix that. That's not really a weakness. So the first two were strengths and weaknesses. They're both internally focused.
And I would say, what are your top three? Debate those and then what actions are you gonna take to leverage the strengths? What actions will you take? to fix those weaknesses, or at least improve on those weaknesses. Then we get to the third and fourth parts of SWOT, which are opportunities and threats.
Opportunities and threats are external facing. An opportunity is not an opportunity to fix a weakness. We've already talked about that within the weaknesses. But an opportunity is, we have, you know, there's an opportunity because there are a lot of underpriced assets out there that we can go buy. There's an opportunity that, you know, our market segment is growing very quickly.
There's an opportunity that one of our competitors went out of business and we've got an opportunity to grab some of their best clients and some of their best people. So opportunities are external and then threats. Last are also external. The economy of a poor economy or the potential of a poor economy is a threat.
A new competitor that you expect may kick your butt or maybe is kicking your butt is a threat. The fact that you may be short, the fact that there may be competitors out there that are feeding off your best people and stealing your best people. That may be a threat.
Threats are external. So for opportunities, what opportunities are we going to go after? What opportunities are we going to go attack and try and realize? And then what threats do we need to protect ourselves from? Or there's their new government regulations. We need to protect ourselves from our new technology that may hurt our business.
So when we use the traditional way of doing a SWOT analysis for a company, that in and of itself challenges people to think bigger picture than just the the little problem that's right in front of them. It challenges the VP of sales from just thinking about issues on his or her sales team to thinking about opportunities and threats and strengths and weaknesses for the company.
So even that traditional SWOT helps us think more strategically. But I want to share with you a couple of other ways to use the SWOT that over the years I have found really, really helpful and help us think strategically. One is to SWOT a situation. Instead of SWOTing your company, when COVID hit and there was the threat of a long lockdown, I swotted the lockdown with my clients.
What does that mean? When you SWOT a situation like a COVID lockdown, or when you SWOT a situation like a pending recession. What you're doing is you're SWOTing your readiness for that situation. So with the COVID lockdown, what are the strengths we have? This was the discussion we had. We said, what are the strengths we have as it relates to a shutdown?
And that's where my clients got to think through. What are some of the things we already have in place that give us the strength? We've got an amazing culture right now. So as other companies may be hurt by being remote. We think we're going to be in great shape. Everybody already has their own laptops and you know, technology they need.
So that's a strength we have that we can leverage. You know, what are the strengths as it relates to a recession for one of my clients, when we SWOTted the recession, they said, well, we are cash rich. So we've got the ability for other companies that do not have a lot of cash. Their value is going to go down and we have the ability in a down economy because we have cash.
We have the ability to do more acquisition and come out of this way stronger. So what are the strengths we have related to whatever the situation is? And then what are the weaknesses related to the situation? What are the things right now that are going to hurt our ability? To deal with that situation, maybe it's about a recession and we happen to have a product that is not recession proof.
Maybe we're all about, you know, luxury spend and in a recession, we may get hurt or we're about marketing or professional development. And those are things that when companies are hurting for cash, they typically cut those out first. So what are the strengths? What are the weaknesses? Again, those are internal.
What are the opportunities we have? What are the threats? of that situation so you can SWOT a situation and man, I use that a lot with my clients, such a powerful way to be more proactive about a situation and come up with a set of activities to help get you better ready to thrive in that situation. And then lastly, as kind of a situational SWOT on steroids is scenario planning.
Scenario planning says, we're going to SWOT a number of different situations. I could remember with COVID and the lockdown, you weren't sure it was going to be a long term lockdown or a short term lockdown. What was going to happen with the economy, so my clients did a SWOT of three or four competing scenarios, you know, what if you think about the recession, a recession, what if the recession hits hard, what if inflation continues, what if we have a soft landing, what if we have a hard landing, you know, what if you look at three or four different scenarios.
And you SWOT each of those scenarios. And for each scenario, you come up with a set of actions, again, from your top three strengths you're going to leverage, top three weaknesses you want to fix, top three opportunities you're going to go after, top three threats you're going to protect yourselves from.
And when you SWOT the three or four different alternatives, you will come up with some number of actions. Which are smart actions to take regardless of the scenario, you could look at four competing scenarios and still say, Hey, it's a good time to go do some M&A, it's a good time to go acquire. What are the actions that are in common across those three or four competing scenarios. And those are the smartest things you can go do now
that strategic thinking, that's thinking beyond what's right in front of you. Beyond just the next 90 days or beyond even the next year. How do we better situate ourselves for the future? So the next time you're tempted to say, Oh, he's just not a strategic thinker. I want you to ask yourself some questions.
Do you have a crystal clear vision and strategy? Do you have one definition for what strategy is? And is it a differentiating strategy? When's the last time you gathered information on your competition?
Are you actively identifying and driving towards those strategic differentiators. And are you using tools like SWOT in both traditional and non traditional ways? You could help your people think more strategically as opposed to just complaining that they're just tactical thinkers. We have control over that.
And again, you can't have a great company without a great leadership team. So I hope this episode, I hope thinking more strategically helps you get there. Thanks.