Your strategy can’t tackle everything at once. To create lasting value, Octopus Organizations make tough trade-offs, focus on a select few customer needs, and carefully choose where to play—and crucially, where not to. Here’s how.
Anchor on durable problems. Get together with your leadership team and write down what you collectively believe the lasting needs of your customers will be over the next 10 years. Then prioritize which of these needs you’ll aim to serve.
Make strategy accessible. Write a two-page narrative that describes your strategy in simple language. Test it with employees, then implement their feedback.
Communicate continuously. Every employee should know your top three strategic priorities. Hold monthly sessions where teams share their interpretation of the strategy and how it’s playing out. Ask employees to draw a line from their daily work to the company’s strategic priorities. Notice where they struggle, and focus on improving strategy and communication there.
Write “this over that” statements. Each statement should explain how your strategy values one thing over another. If these trade-offs don’t cause strong debates and create defensible opposites, you don’t have a strategy.
Test strategy specifically with a “competitor swap” exercise. Remove your company’s logo from your strategy document and replace it with a competitor’s. Test with your leadership team to see whether the strategy still makes sense. If it does, it’s not differentiated. Iterate until your strategy is wholly yours and couldn’t possibly be another company’s. |
