Manual De Investigacion

www.hbr.org
Can You Say What
Your Strategy Is?
by David J. Collis and Michael G. Rukstad
It’s a dirty little secret: Most
executives cannot articulate
the objective, scope, and
advantage of their business in
a simple statement. If they
can’t, neither can anyone else.
Reprint R0804E
Can You Say What
Your Strategy Is?

by David J. Collis and Michael G. Rukstad
harvard business review• april 2008 page 1
COPYRIGHT © 2008 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
It’s a dirty little secret: Most executives cannot articulate the objective,
scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. If they
can’t, neither can anyone else.
Can you summarize your company’s strategy
in 35 words or less? If so, would your colleagues
put it the sameway?
It is our experience that very few executives
can honestly answer these simple questions in
the affirmative. And the companies that those
executives work for are often the most
successful in their industry. One is Edward
Jones, a St. Louis–based brokerage firm with
which one of us has been involved for more
than 10 years. The fourth-largest brokerage in
the United States, Jones hasquadrupled its
market share during the past two decades, has
consistently outperformed its rivals in terms
of ROI through bull and bear markets, and
has been a fixture on Fortune’s list of the top
companies to work for. It’s a safe bet that
just about every one of its 37,000 employees
could express the company’s succinct strategy
statement: Jones aims to “grow to 17,000 financial
advisersby 2012 [from about 10,000
today] by offering trusted and convenient
face-to-face financial advice to conservative
individual investors who delegate their financial
decisions, through a national network of
one-financial-adviser offices.”
Conversely, companies that don’t have a
simple and clear statement of strategy are
likely to fall into the sorry category of those
that have failed toexecute their strategy or,
worse, those that never even had one. In an
astonishing number of organizations, executives,
frontline employees, and all those in
between are frustrated because no clear
strategy exists for the company or its lines
of business. The kinds of complaints that
abound in such firms include:
• “I try for months to get an initiative off
the ground, and then it is shutdown because
‘it doesn’t fit the strategy.’ Why didn’t anyone
tell me that at the beginning?”
• “I don’t know whether I should be pursuing
this market opportunity. I get mixed signals
from the powers that be.”
• “Why are we bidding on this customer’s
business again? We lost it last year, and I
thought we agreed then not to waste our time
chasing the contract!”
Can You Say What YourStrategy Is?
harvard business review • april 2008 page 2
• “Should I cut the price for this customer?
I don’t know if we would be better off winning
the deal at a lower price or just losing
the business.”
Leaders of firms are mystified when what
they thought was a beautifully crafted strategy
is never implemented. They assume that
the initiatives described in the voluminous
documentation thatemerges from an annual
budget or a strategic-planning process will
ensure competitive success. They fail to appreciate
the necessity of having a simple,
clear, succinct strategy statement that everyone
can internalize and use as a guiding light
for making difficult choices.
Think of a major business as a mound of
10,000 iron filings, each one representing an
employee. If you scoop upthat many filings
and drop them onto a piece of paper, they’ll
be pointing in every direction. It will be a big
mess: 10,000 smart people working hard and
making what they think are the right decisions
for the company—but with the net
result of confusion. Engineers in the R&D
department are creating a product with “must
have” features for which (as the marketing
group could have told...