5 Reasons Most “Strategies” Fail

1 June 2022

Photo by cottonbro: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-person-s-hands-4631064/

I wanted to start posting more strategy posts on Medium because I like writing in the platform and a lot of people come here to learn about strategy and how to take action on their strategic action lists.

In general, my outline for strategic thinking follows through 5 steps:

• Ambition: What you want to become.
• Focus: Where you are going to point your attention.
• Value: Why you?
• Resources: Plans. People. Tools. The things you need.
• Actions: An idea without action might be good…so to make your strategy successful, you have to take action.

Today, I want to start out with some reasons that folks see their strategies fail. This isn’t a comprehensive list because every organization can find a way to struggle with their strategy that is unique to them.

But these 5 examples come up repeatedly in my work.

Failure to Focus:

This is the “You Can’t Be Everything to Everyone” principle. Even if you are a generalist, like me, you have to have some sort of focus.

I focus on strategy 3 ways:

• Corporate level
• Brand level
• Marketing level