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.

You have limited resources, and as long as this is true you will need to make tradeoffs, if you are not making any you are not making real decisions.