I've been in the food / retail business for a bit now. But I've been exposed to financial services, technology, and luxury products as well. Although most of the time, when you ask someone what is their strategy, answers flow like this:
Our strategy is to expedite mission-critical initiatives, evolve extensible deliverables, leverage global action-items, and create synergistical solutions that deliver the best end-to-end solutions,(ok, I didn't make that up myself, but here's what I used : bullshit generator), aka a whole lot of bullshit, lies and wishy washy talk.
Here's an example from the world of grocery:
One of the leaders on my floor had an idea to increase the basket size of customers shopping at stores, so he suggested that as customers walked in the store, the greeters will place case of water in their carts and say- "Hey! If you spend $50 today, you get this case of water for free!"
But what actually happened was something like this; the grocery store would instead wait for customers to ring in their purchases and if their purchases were over $50, give them a free case of water and say-"Oh, you spent $50 today, here's a free case of water", and the customer would reply back-"Oh thanks, I didn't even know about this".
So instead of motivating the customers to purchase more, which was the big-picture idea, the store ended up rewarding shoppers who were already spending 50 bucks anyways. What was wrong here was the lack of leaders and visionaries to participate in the details. Most leaders quote themselves as high-level, big picture thinkers, but as you saw in the case above, things don't always work out as planned.
There's only one strategy that really matters at the end of the day, and its EXECUTION. If you spend your entire life being a visionary, big-picture thinker, telling people what to do, following up, but never actually do any of those tasks yourself, you probably will never understand why things didn't go as planned and will never learn how to fix them.
Don't let the big picture blindside you. Strategize, but EXECUTE.
Our strategy is to expedite mission-critical initiatives, evolve extensible deliverables, leverage global action-items, and create synergistical solutions that deliver the best end-to-end solutions,(ok, I didn't make that up myself, but here's what I used : bullshit generator), aka a whole lot of bullshit, lies and wishy washy talk.
Here's an example from the world of grocery:
One of the leaders on my floor had an idea to increase the basket size of customers shopping at stores, so he suggested that as customers walked in the store, the greeters will place case of water in their carts and say- "Hey! If you spend $50 today, you get this case of water for free!"
But what actually happened was something like this; the grocery store would instead wait for customers to ring in their purchases and if their purchases were over $50, give them a free case of water and say-"Oh, you spent $50 today, here's a free case of water", and the customer would reply back-"Oh thanks, I didn't even know about this".
So instead of motivating the customers to purchase more, which was the big-picture idea, the store ended up rewarding shoppers who were already spending 50 bucks anyways. What was wrong here was the lack of leaders and visionaries to participate in the details. Most leaders quote themselves as high-level, big picture thinkers, but as you saw in the case above, things don't always work out as planned.
There's only one strategy that really matters at the end of the day, and its EXECUTION. If you spend your entire life being a visionary, big-picture thinker, telling people what to do, following up, but never actually do any of those tasks yourself, you probably will never understand why things didn't go as planned and will never learn how to fix them.
Don't let the big picture blindside you. Strategize, but EXECUTE.
