© Strayer University. All Rights Reserved. This document contains Strayer University confidential and proprietary information and may not be copied, further distributed, or otherwise disclosed, in whole or in part, without the expressed written permission of Strayer University. JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 1 of 9 JWI 540: Strategy Week Seven Lecture Notes © Strayer University. All Rights Reserved. This document contains Strayer University confidential and proprietary information and may not be copied, further distributed, or otherwise disclosed, in whole or in part, without the expressed written permission of Strayer University. JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 2 of 9 IDENTIFYING GAME-WINNING MOVES What It Means Building a winning strategy is energizing and can provide insight into the future. With focus, it should take anywhere between a few days and a month to create it. After that, it's time to act. It's time to make your game-changing move that will enable your organization to win. A winning strategy is a chosen direction that is executed with passion. The readings and exercises from the previous weeks have probably helped generate a number of possible winning strategies for your organization’s future. Now, it’s time to focus on determining which ones you are ready to pursue. Why It Matters • Being open to lots of new ideas is essential for the “What if…?” portions of strategy development but having too many initiatives going at once will lead to clutter and lack of focus. • Most organizations cannot effectively manage more than two or three key strategic initiatives at once. If the strategies are large-scale or are a significant departure from the way business has been done in the past, that number may be reduced to a single core initiative. • Selecting a clear, straightforward plan of action makes it easier to explain to your organization where the company is going and to rally everyone’s support. “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion.” Jack Welch © Strayer University. All Rights Reserved. This document contains Strayer University confidential and proprietary information and may not be copied, further distributed, or otherwise disclosed, in whole or in part, without the expressed written permission of Strayer University. JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 3 of 9 YOUR STARTING POINT • In what ways has the 5-Step Strategy Framework helped you to develop several possible game-changing moves that you could pursue? • Which of these moves do you feel confident will drive growth and customer loyalty, and which of these can be implemented in the upcoming year? • Which ones do you feel are high-potential game changers, but are further out on the time horizon for implementation? Wha ...

1. © Strayer University. All Rights Reserved. This document
contains Strayer University confidential and proprietary
information and may not be
copied, further distributed, or otherwise disclosed, in whole or
in part, without the expressed written permission of Strayer
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JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 1 of 9
JWI 540: Strategy
Week Seven Lecture Notes
© Strayer University. All Rights Reserved. This document
contains Strayer University confidential and proprietary
information and may not be
copied, further distributed, or otherwise disclosed, in whole or

2. in part, without the expressed written permission of Strayer
University.
JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 2 of 9
IDENTIFYING GAME-WINNING MOVES
What It Means
Building a winning strategy is energizing and can provide
insight into the future. With focus, it should take
anywhere between a few days and a month to create it. After
that, it's time to act. It's time to make your
game-changing move that will enable your organization to win.
A winning strategy is a chosen direction
that is executed with passion. The readings and exercises from
the previous weeks have probably helped
generate a number of possible winning strategies for your
organization’s future. Now, it’s time to focus on
determining which ones you are ready to pursue.
Why It Matters
• Being open to lots of new ideas is essential for the “What

3. if…?” portions of strategy development
but having too many initiatives going at once will lead to clutter
and lack of focus.
• Most organizations cannot effectively manage more than two
or three key strategic initiatives at
once. If the strategies are large-scale or are a significant
departure from the way business has
been done in the past, that number may be reduced to a single
core initiative.
• Selecting a clear, straightforward plan of action makes i t
easier to explain to your organization
where the company is going and to rally everyone’s support.
“Good business leaders create a vision,
articulate the vision, passionately own
the vision and relentlessly drive it to
completion.”

4. Jack Welch
© Strayer University. All Rights Reserved. This document
contains Strayer University confidential and proprietary
information and may not be
copied, further distributed, or otherwise disclosed, in whole or
in part, without the expressed written permission of Strayer
University.
JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 3 of 9
YOUR STARTING POINT
• In what ways has the 5-Step Strategy Framework helped you
to develop several possible
game-changing moves that you could pursue?
• Which of these moves do you feel confident will drive growth
and customer loyalty, and which

5. of these can be implemented in the upcoming year?
• Which ones do you feel are high-potential game changers, but
are further out on the time
horizon for implementation? What is preventing you from
implementing these now?
• As you get ready to implement your game-winning move(s),
do you feel confident you
understand the culture and limitations of your organization so
that you don’t try to pursue too
many initiatives at once?
• What events could surface that may require you to change
your strategy?

6. • Have you clearly identified the additional resources that will
be needed to pursue your game-
winning move? Have you validated these with others on your
team?
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copied, further distributed, or otherwise disclosed, in whole or
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JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 4 of 9
IDENTIFYING YOUR GAME-WINNING MOVE
In previous weeks, we have looked at several components of
strategy development, including:

7. • Assessing and defining the market segment – the playing field
– in which you want to
compete.
• Evaluating your competitors to identify their strengths,
weaknesses, and vulnerabilities.
• Evaluating your company’s core competencie s and how they
measure up as potential
sustainable advantages relative to your competitors’ capabilities
and market opportunities.
• Exploring ways to generate strategic options and refine these
options down to those that are
most likely to lead to meaningful differentiation in the market.
Now, we will narrow our focus and consider game-winning
moves that have the potential to create
more profit, market share, and competitive advantage.
You now know that strategy development is iterative. It is
adapted and refined as we learn more
about business environment realities and we act on them. While
some strategy models advocate a
rigid step-by-step process, even the most linear models are
intended to help you ask questions in
ways that get the creative juices flowing. This means that,
despite your best efforts to “check the

8. boxes” sequentially as you develop your strategy, you will
naturally have new discoveries at
various points along the way. They might cause you to go back
and rethink something you were
quite certain about when you began. That’s good, but still, we
have to make our choices and move
ahead.
To help accomplish this, we suggested in last week’s lecture
notes that you organize your strategic
options into seven categories of game-winning moves. The use
of categories is not intended to
pigeonhole your ideas. It is to help you better understand where
your idea fits into a framework of
moves. There are two primary advantages to this approach:
1. These categories of winning moves have proven themselves
over time and across
industries. While different strategists may organize such lists in
different ways, the point is
to be able to leverage the categories as a tool to clarify what
your potential moves are
actually doing.
2. Reviewing your strategic options against a set of categories
of moves may help to turn up

9. additional options that are worth considering, but which have
been initially overlooked.
Sometimes, the categories of winning moves can overlap. For
example, an M&A deal may also
achieve considerable geographic expansion. A move into an
adjacent product segment may also
be paired with a strategy around new price tiers. The important
takeaway is to under stand how
these moves can be used by your company to create more
traction on the playing field and to be
able to recognize them when your competitors use them.
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JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 5 of 9
EVALUATE THE OPTIONS

10. Once you generate strategic options, the next step is evaluation.
Although the more strategic options you
can generate, the better, you’ll want to eliminate weak ideas
early in the process. Ideally, as you consider
options, you will improve them, too. Say you come up with the
idea of a low-cost, mobile fast food service
targeted at young suburban office workers. What if you
combined that idea with novel approaches to
ordering via mobile apps and the storing of repeat customers’
preferences, since these workers will
presumably want to call in their orders and get back to work
quickly? Details could be worked out later.
But an initial evaluation of whether this newly identified market
segment values convenient, technology-
enabled ordering could transform a strategic option with modest
prospects into one with significant
potential.
The initial screening of options can begin with three simple
questions:
1. Is It Big?
What is the size of the potential market? This question is not

11. intended to bog you down in
detailed analysis. But you need to quickly eliminate good ideas
that have only limited potential.
2. Is It Us?
Sometimes, a strategic option is great, but does not fit with the
rest of your company’s strategic
activities. Alternatively, it runs counter to your history, values,
or skill set. Assessing the value of
the idea with specific reference to your organization can quickly
flash a red or a green light.
3. Is It Time?
Being too early to market is sometimes worse than being too
late. Ask yourself whether there is a
critical mass of eager customers ready to adopt this option. Are
necessary complementary
technologies ready to support it?
Of course, most evaluations will also contain a financial
component, such as a net-present-value analysis.
The farther the options you are considering are from your core
business, the less useful the traditional
evaluation tools will be. But estimates of market size and

12. demand trends can still help narrow your
choices, even when you are moving into unfamiliar territory.
If a plausible business model for the option connect be
identified, it should be rejected or recycled. It may
need to be reconfigured in some way, either through creative
insights or additional economic analysis, if it
is to have real strategic potential. Some situations – such as
when considerable uncertainty about
demand, external trends, or new technologies exists – call for
the pursuit of options despite the lack of a
strong business model. However, investments should be kept
small and implementation should be
discovery-driven – that is, with the aim of gaining more
information about market size, demand, and other
variables during the experimental period.
LOOP IN THE RIGHT OPTION EVALUATORS
Some people are great at generating ideas. Others are astute at
choosing combinations of ideas that
reinforce each other and fit an organization’s existing skills and
energies. These people are particularly

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JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 6 of 9
valuable during the evaluation stage. There are also a number of
useful roles that people can play during
evaluation.
• The provocateur asks the questions that force people to think,
or voices the unspoken truth that
people are unwilling to address – the elephant in the room.
• The devil’s advocate argues against an emerging viewpoint in
order to test its logic.
• The facilitator ensures that all voices are heard and that
agreed-upon processes are followed.

14. Choosing among options is typically not an either-or decision.
It involves weighing options in the context
of your organization. It requires the creative combination of
apparently unrelated ideas into a single,
powerful strategy. But first, you need a menu of options that are
robust and even inspiring. Too often,
companies focus on the ultimate selection at the expense of the
list from which it is selected.
Far too many meetings consist of some team at the front of a
room offering three choices to senior
executives – the gold-plated option, the bare-bones option, and
the just-right option. A choice is made
from among these three, and off it goes to be implemented. An
effective strategist asks questions at such
a meeting: What are you not showing me? What alternatives did
not make it into the presentation? What
was your second-best option? Ask these questions, and you will
bring additional alternatives and
potentially stronger strategies to the surface.
IDENTIFYING THE POSITIONING CATEGORIES
In the text, If You’re in a Dogfight, Become a Cat! Sherman
describes several positioning categories

15. for the range of strategic options. They include:
1. Breakout Positioning. Developed by Youngme Moon, these
strategies are designed to
break away from the pack. They include two sub-categories:
a. Reverse positioning: Reversing the trend of constant
augmentation of product
performance by stripping away features from high-end offerings
that don’t add
appreciable value and replacing them with unexpected
alternatives.
b. Breakaway positioning: Redefining how customers see a
company’s services and
products by borrowing from attributes from entirely different
products/service categories
to completely upend traditional perceptions of these categories.
2. Blue Ocean Strategy. Sherman briefly references W Chan
Kim and Renee Mauborgne’s
positioning concept of creating and capturing uncontested
market share by combining unique
differentiation and lower costs to open up a new market and
create new demand.
3. Disruptive Innovation (or Technology). Originally developed
by Clayton Christensen, disruptive

16. innovation includes positioning moves that create accessibility
and affordability in products for
mass adoption, thus redefining the product or service space.
This is often misunderstood to
mean that the disruptive innovation needs to include
breakthrough technologies. This is not
necessarily the case. It can include an innovative business
model that targets new customers
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JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 7 of 9
who had not been in the market, or consumers who could not
previously afford to buy the
products. It may also include an improved value network with
suppliers and distributers that
provides customers with additional value from the disruptive
innovation.

17. Many strategic objectives might fit into more than one of these
positioning categories, but it is helpful
to be able to identify the correct positioning strategy and to be
able to recognize it in the strategic
moves your competitors make.
MAKING THE CALL
Endless deliberation is not an option in the real world. After the
research has been done, and key
members of the team have had their say, you will have to make
the call. All str ategic decisions
involve risk. Postposing a decision also involves risk – the risk
that your competitors will make a
game-winning move before you do, leaving you on the sidelines
saying, "Why didn’t we see that
coming?”
Even with the best research and the best processes to generate
and refine ideas, strategy remains a
game of probability that must balance risk and reward. If you
have done your homework and
leveraged the tools of strategy development, then the time has
come to put a plan into action. When

18. this happens, you must focus firmly on the execution, something
we will discuss more thoroughly in
Weeks 9 and 10. Second-guessing the strategy before it has
been given a chance to succeed will
undermine your plan before it even gets off the ground.
In short, you are well advised to take Jack’s guidance seriously:
“When it comes to strategy, ponder
less and do more.”
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contains Strayer University confidential and proprietary
information and may not be
copied, further distributed, or otherwise disclosed, in whole or
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JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 8 of 9
SUCCEEDING BEYOND THE COURSE

19. As you read the materials and participate in class activities, stay
focused on the key learning outcomes
for the week and how they can be applied to your job.
• Identify the most viable moves for your chosen company
Together with your team, review each of the short-listed
strategies to determine if any cannot be
done in the next year and why it is off the table (e.g., funding
limitations). Next, ask each member
of the team to prioritize the list in the order they think is most
likely to disrupt the marketplace. To
get the most out of this exercise, ask each leader to work
independently on the ranking. Collect
the individual feedback and summarize the possible strategies in
the order most team members
suggested.
• Understand how your options relate to the range of positioning
categories
Use the positioning categories we covered as a framework to
determine where your most viable

20. moves fit and how they align to the market opportunities and
capabilities of the organization.
Rank the moves from most aligned to least aligned. Your
growth initiative needs to be significant
enough to make a difference to your growth trend. Remember,
the goal of your new strategy is to
create a source of competitive advantage that can’t be easily
replicated, at least in the short
term.
• Narrow your strategic options to a preferred strategy
The time has come to stop pondering and act. Strategy
development can’t be a never-ending
undertaking. You must select the best option and move forward.
Ask yourself:
o Will this strategy disrupt the marketplace to our advantage?
o Will it generate revenue growth for our business?
o Will it increase customer loyalty in the longer term?
o Will it create a sustainable advantage and not be easily
replicable?

21. If any of the answers to these questions is “no”, then you need
to revisit the strategy and modify it
to make it more impactful for your business. Remember, the
goal is to select a winning strategy
that will generate growth for at least the next several years.
© Strayer University. All Rights Reserved. This document
contains Strayer University confidential and proprietary
information and may not be
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JWI 540 – Lecture Notes (1214) Page 9 of 9
ACTION PLAN
To apply what I have learned this week in my course to my job,
I will…

22. Action Item(s)
Resources and Tools Needed (from this course and in my
workplace)
Timeline and Milestones
Success Metrics