What are your strategic opposites?

Strategy is all about choices - and choices have trade-offs. In business however there are lots of so called ‘choices’ that are not actually choices, for example:

• Our strategy is to be efficient

How do you know if this is a real strategy, a real choice or not? One simple technique is to define its opposite. In other words the thing a choice leaves behind. In our example above this would be:

• Our strategy is to not be efficient

This is clearly not a viable alternative - so the original statement is masquerading as a choice but is really not. Statements like these are permissions to play - you need to have them to compete, but they are not enough to win. This is like a runner saying “my strategy to win the 200m is to have good shoes”.

Real choices

Lets look at some real choices to get an idea of what opposites look like:

• We are only going to serve market X

This is a choice, as other markets Y and Z will not be served by you.

• We are only going to sell 3 products maximum

This is a choice, as you can create and sell as many products as you like.

Summary

Look at your strategy and note down the its opposite - the things you have chosen not to do. This will give you confidence that your choices are real choices.