Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly, I'm Jonathan Stark. Moving from implementation work to strategy work is a great way to increase the profitability of your business. But you can't effectively sell or deliver strategy offerings if you don't really understand what the word strategy means. If you ask ten people, what is strategy, you'd probably get back ten different answers. Odds are that most of them would be accurate, but precious few would be useful. You'd probably get answers like, strategy is knowing what not to do, and strategy is the answer to the question, how are we going to accomplish our objective? Strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a major aim. Strategy is how we get from here to there. These are all good answers. They're not wrong. They're accurate. But do they deepen your understanding of what a good strategy is or how to create one? If not, then I think it would be useful to have something a little more specific. So, how do we define the word strategy in a more useful way? The most useful definition I've been able to come up with is something that I cobbled together from personal experience and reading the amazing book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. And here's the definition. Strategy is a concise, high-level approach to achieving an objective by playing strengths against weaknesses in an unexpected way. Now, the editor in me wants to trim this definition down a bit, but after a lot of careful consideration, I believe that every word in it is indispensable. The statement breaks into two roughly equal parts. The first is what a good strategy is, i.e. a concise, high-level approach to achieving an objective. And the second half is how to create a good strategy, i.e. by playing strengths against weaknesses in an unexpected way. I want to break it down even more, so let's look at some of the internal phrases and word choices here. Concise. A good strategy needs to be memorable and easy to communicate. The longer it is, the less likely it'll be understood and or remembered. High-level approach. A strategy is not a list of tasks or actions, i.e. tactics. Tactics are important, and they do come out of a strategy, but they are not the strategy itself. By the way, I wanted to say high-level plan here instead of high-level approach, but I've found that the word plan is too easily interpreted as a list of tactics, which would increase confusion, so I rejected that. Alright, the next one is to achieving an objective. If you don't have an objective, it'd be impossible to create a strategy. Strategy can't exist in the absence of an objective. That'd be like trying to answer the question, how should we? There's just not enough there. Alright, the next section of the statement is by playing strengths. In any given situation, you're going to have certain assets or skills or qualities that are advantageous. They might be liabilities in another context, but they're advantages in this context. And that leads right into the next piece, which is against weaknesses. In any given situation, your opponent or obstacle or challenge or market will always have some vulnerability or weakness or limitation or gap. The implication here is that you need to have enough situational awareness to recognize what the weakness is. And then finally, in an unexpected way. I've thought a lot about removing this phrase from my definition of strategy, but every example I found of a really great strategy contained an element of surprise. Specifically, an insight that was both totally unexpected, but immediately obvious in retrospect. And maybe a strategy in a low-stakes situation doesn't need an element of surprise, but I think in a high-stakes situation it's probably a make-or-break inclusion. So having written all this, I have to admit the subjectivity of the premise, which was to provide a useful definition of the word strategy. Whether something is useful or not is totally subjective. But this definition has been really useful to me, and I hope it'll be useful to you. That's it for today. I'm Jonathan Stark, and I hope you join me again next time for Ditching Hourly. Bye. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time? Or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space? Or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to JonathanStark.com slash call. C-A-L-L. That URL again is JonathanStark.com slash call. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again.

Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time. Or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space. Or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call. C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.