What future could you create?

As a leader, what’s your strategy for long term performance and growth? It’s easy and all too common to become distracted by the demands on the day. Many businesses are driven by quarterly and annual financial performance, often to the detriment of everything else. Public sector organizations are driven by politics and political interests, which tend to have a near term focus too, usually associated with election cycles. Leaders are called upon to cope with near term realities while remaining steadfastly focused on developing a strategy for long term performance and executing that strategy.

Leaders need to evolve their thinking about where they want their enterprises to be in the future. I say “evolve” because determining where you want to take your enterprise is an iterative process. What major trends or shifts are likely to occur over the next several years? What will demand look like? What things will be most valued? How well are you positioned to serve that demand? What does the competition look like? These are some of the many questions must be explored to develop a strategy to create the future you want. Conventional strategy development methods, including strength-weaknesses-opportunities-threats (SWOT) and balanced score card, strive to address these questions. They provide a reasonable starting point, but as we’ll discuss, they have fundamental limitations.

In order to build strategies that improve long term performance, leaders must identify the advantages that they currently have and determine how to leverage them. Too often, leaders are preoccupied with putting out daily fires or meeting quarterly performance targets. They may not even recognize the advantages they currently possess, much less focus on using them. Advantages might include holding contracts with a highly sought-after customer, having relationships and access to key decision makers, having hard-to-replicate technical know-how or intellectual property, specialized facilities, or even the luxury of time to act. Some advantages are more valuable than others. You may discover that there are other advantages that need to be developed where they don’t exist today. The most important advantages need to be nurtured like plants in a garden. If left unattended, they will be crowded out by weeds or just wither away.

As a leader, to ensure the best prospect for long term performance, you must develop a strategy to nurture the advantages you have and those you need to be successful in the future. It’s vital to not squander the advantages you currently have. Strategic advantages are not created overnight. They take time to develop and nurture. But, by taking deliberate, intelligent steps early enough, effective strategies can be developed and implemented with relatively modest investment of time and resources. What future could you create?