Shared Six misconceptions about Strategy. Differentiation between Goals, Actions and Strategy. What is strategy and what is not a strategy.

2. Objective
O To share “Six common misconceptions
about what is strategy”

3. O Why need to understand strategy? (New
team)
O Strategy is a common word in the
manager's vocabulary
O Mistaken as Objectives and Actions
O What strategy is not?

4. What is Strategy
O It is a manner in which the firm gains the favor of its
customers
O Strategy is the outcome of knowledge gained from past
action.
O It is the insight gained from activity, and not the activity
itself
O Action is not strategy until:
O 'Where'
O Leads to the destination, the end they seek.
O 'How'
O Selected defined paths to achieve desired end result and
not SOP
O 'What'
O Prescribes activities

5. 1. The Fallacy of Action
O 'How shall we achieve growth?‘
O Let's enter new markets. Or,
O Train sales engineers to sell better.
O Increase the number of calls sales people
make.
O Introduce new products.
O Do something, anything !

6. 2. The greed for Scale
O How stated objectives will be achieved?
O Some managers will offer to do more.
O They would add manpower,
O Appoint more resellers,
O Open more outlets, increase production, or
O Simply work harder

7. 2. The greed for Scale
O Scale without customer retention plan?
O Scale without increasing customers?
O Kind of customers (Segmenting)
O Customer preferences
O Where they are how to attract them
O Kind of product and service required to
attract and satisfy
O Scale without effective competitive
strategy?

8. 3. High Quality, Low Cost,
Superior Customer Service
O Is it differentiation or expectation of
customers for continuous improvement
O Which business can survive by:
O Charging higher cost without delivering
unique or superior benefit
O Providing static or low quality
O And providing bad quality

9. 3. High Quality, Low Cost,
Superior Customer Service
O Backward integration for offering better
pricing, High quality and providing
customer service can be strategy.
O Reliance
O Ford motors.

10. 4. Strategy is not secret
O Top Management has only access to
strategy.
O Hard to formulate in strategy living
organization with help of Managers and
ground team.
O Secret is no more applicable:
O All competitors also has access of similar
information, resource and opportunities.
O Activities can be secret, But surely
Strategy is not.

11. 5. Hurting competition is
not strategy
O Destroy smaller competitors.
O The flaw is in focusing strategy on
competition instead of the customer.
O Small players exist because there is a
market for their products.
O Large companies often cannot or do not
fulfil the needs of some sections of
customers

12. 5. Hurting competition is
not strategy
O Strategy for the market leader:
O Growing usage and creating new niches in
a growing market
O Coke:
O Thanda Matlab Cocacola
O No formality
O Zero sugar coke
O Cadbury

13. 6. Annual Operating Plan is
not strategy
O Jack Welch:
O Men could not reduce strategy to a formula.
O Detailed planning necessarily failed, due to the
inevitable frictions encountered:
O Chance events, imperfections in execution, and
the independent will of the opposition."

14. Strategy Annual plan
OProduct of insight
OBroad direction
that permits
experimentation,
adaptation and
learning from
experience
OProgram of
action
OExpects actions
will be performed
as stated and
reasons for
success or
failure learnt
from post
mortem

15. Source:
O http://www.vnbhattacharya.com/
O http://www.forbes.com/sites/freekvermeule
n/2013/11/22/what-strategy-is-not/
O Article by Jack welch, Bill Gates and
Ratan Tata on Strategy.
O www.google.com