Is our strategy any good
Five properties as pass or fail, resources with real numbers, and the scenarios it has to survive.
Strategy is one of the most used and least understood words in business. Ask most leadership teams for theirs and you get a wish list of milestones, or a mission statement dressed up in strategic language. Neither one is a strategy.
A company can succeed for a while without a real one, but it is not beating the odds. It is spending down luck nobody has noticed yet, and luck always runs out.
Richard Rumelt laid out what a real strategy requires in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. This checklist runs his five properties as a pass or fail, adds the simplicity test, and forces real numbers onto the resources, because without concrete amounts a strategy is a fantasy rather than a plan.
What you get
- Rumelt's five properties as a pass or fail, with room to note where each one fails
- The simplicity test, and what a no actually means
- A resource table that requires dollars, people, or units
- Four risk scenarios to test the strategy against
- The three-leader test for whether your business, product, and technology strategies are actually aligned
Where should we send it?
One email with the worksheet. You can unsubscribe from anything else in one click.
On its way
Check your inbox. If it has not landed in a minute or two, look in promotions or spam, and add sam@startuppatterns.com to your contacts so the rest arrive.
Adapted from the Organization chapter of The Mindful Product Company by Sam McAfee.