This weekend I finished a fantastic Udemy course on Strategy by Executive Coach Ron Carucci. All Marqetans get free Udemy for Business account, so I didn’t have to pay for this. Here is the link if you want to consider taking this course. I am also putting my notes and learnings from this course below.
Being Strategic: Thinking and Acting with Impact
Here are 6 myths about strategy.
Myth#1: strategic thinking is about thinking up big ideas.
Truth: strategic thinking does require having ideas, but those ideas have to be relevant to your company’s context
Myth#2: being more strategic, means you are more productive
Truth: strategic thinkers don’t do more, they do more of the right things
Myth#3: strategic thinking is talking about financial or market metrics
Truth: strategic thinkers know what metrics their company tracks and how those metrics help the company make important business decisions
Myth#4: strategic thinking means you have smart answers
Truth: strategic thinkers ask smart questions
Myth#5: being strategic means you decide what’s important
Truth: being strategic means focusing the organization on getting the priority work finished
Myth#6: being strategic is only required for those at the top
Truth: strategic thinkers are at all levels of the company
Strategy is your company’s unique identity. it’s the basis on which your company can compete and win. Differentiation and Capabilities are the most fundamental basis of Strategy.
Differentiation is the basis on which you can distinguish yourself from other people who provide the same product or service as yours.
Capabilities (or strategic capabilities) are the processes, technologies and talents that combine together to form unique muscles your company uses to be good at the things your customer wants.
Three models of jobs in your company are – operating (most employees), coordinating (mid-level management) and strategic (leadership team).
There are 4 kinds of work a company does.
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Competitive Work – Product Development, 10-15%
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Competitive-Enabling Work – Customer Analytics, 15-20%
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Business Essentials Work – Parity with competitors, routine functions, 60-75%
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Non-essential Work – 5-25%
Being strategic is a team sport. While acting strategically, you may face the following 4 issues as strategic work are ambiguous, long term and outcomes are more uncertain.
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Feeling of a sense of lost controls over our work
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Fair of failures
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Fair of disappointing others
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Loss of immediate gratification
A strategy is of no use if it can’t be executed. Fake it till make it is not a good strategy. Here are some areas where your strategy may fail.
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Failure to understand the context
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Failure to sett and keep priorities and to make hard trade offs
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Failure to protect the competitive work
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Published by ashikuzzaman
Driven servant leader experienced in building robust and innovative team of software engineers, growing people along with business and technology. Twenty years of experience as Engineering Leader and Software Engineer in developing large scale distributed systems with specialization in Java, AWS, Microservices. A natural leader, easy to work with, and approachable excelling in motivating employees into top-performing teams.
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