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Your first step in defining strategy is to describe the promise you are making to your customer. Of course, we assume you know who your customer is, if you don’t, then describe your customer first.

Examples of promises are:

• If you are a cell phone company, your promise could be that phone calls will be clear and no calls will be dropped.
• If you are a company that makes laptops, your promise could be that the system will never crash, you will never lose your data, and the user experience will be the best that money can buy.
• If you are a job seeker, your promise could be that you will deliver results to grow revenue and improve customer satisfaction, while inspiring your co-workers.

A promise is meaningful is someone will pay you to keep it. The payment could be to cover your costs, or it could be a premium well over the cost of keeping your promise. If no one cares about your promise, then it is meaningless.

You could make many different kinds of promises, the question is, which one are you going to pick and focus on? This choice is the essence of strategy.

(Thanks to Kate for this insight)

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In the next few posts, we’ll take a look at “strategy” and provide a few questions for you to ponder upon. This is by no means a comprehensive treatise on business strategy, for that you can go here or here or read this book, or sign up for a MBA program.

The point about strategy is to be thoughtful, and gain a competitive advantage via game changing choices and actions. Most of the questions relating to defining strategy are very simple, and a clear strategy will result in a simple answer. It is the simplification that is the hardest part of defining business strategy.

You may think if your strategy is hard to explain, it will be hard to copy. This is a myth. A lack of clarity is not a competitive advantage, it is a competitive disadvantage, because you will lose your execution capabilities as your teams waste time trying to figure out how to align to the strategy.

Your strategy is always on, meaning, you are making choices whether you know it or not. You cannot not have a strategy. Therefore, you might as well make it explicit, write it down, analyze it, communicate it, and plug gaps before you enter the execution phase.