Strategy Now

Recently we asked over 100 CEOs to name the biggest challenges they face today. Many of them pointed to the same few themes: growing uncertainty, changing stakeholder expectations, unpredictable political pressures, and keeping pace with the growing power of new technologies that create both opportunity and risk.

That’s why we set out to describe strategy now—to highlight some of the new global and marketplace realities facing business leaders and link them to a new approach to creating strategy that we believe will yield better results. 

Because a new way is needed, better matched to the challenges of today. If the world is moving fast, strategy needs to be agile. If the challenges are complex, strategy needs to be inclusive. If the future is uncertain, strategy needs to be resilient. And if the status quo is being serially disrupted by powerful new technologies, strategy needs to be bold.

The Evolving Marketplace

Just as the world around business and markets has shifted in recent years, so too has the marketplace itself, creating new options for strategists to consider and new challenges to resolve as they consider how to create and capture value today. Four stand out:       

• New sources of advantage create new options for strategic leverage
• Look beyond the boundaries of “industry” to unlock new possibilities
• Technology changes what companies can do, not just how they do it 
• Inspire and align an expanded set of stakeholders in pursuit of long-term value

Strategy development now 

Winning strategy today needs to reflect the fast-paced, disruptive environment that companies operate in, while managing the hard tension between commitment and flexibility in markets that are changing rapidly. To achieve that, the process to develop strategy should evolve around six mutually reinforcing principles tailored to the new context:

• Embrace uncertainty to build resilience
• Be quick and decisive
• Close the gap with execution
• Identify and synthesize diverse perspectives from inside and outside the organization
• Leverage data and analytics to make better informed choices
• Match bold plans with bold execution 

The pace and extent of change now—geopolitical, economic, technological, environmental, and more, all at once—make it urgent to consider the options available to organizations as a cohesive, mutually reinforcing set of choices.

What next? 

So, where to start? Perhaps by considering a few questions whose answers can point to practical options for next steps: 

1. How does your strategy position you to create and maintain an advantaged position specifically in light of today’s macro and market environments?
2. Where does your strategy capitalize on sources of value and competitive advantage that lie outside of traditional industry norms?
3. How have you evolved your organization’s capabilities to adapt to the changing conditions in which you need to compete and win? 
4. Does your strategy reflect the needs of diverse stakeholders (internal and external) and have you gained their alignment on the strategy? How have you stimulated an inclusive yet bold and ambitious dialogue across multiple contributors to the strategy development process?
5. What plausible scenarios have you developed for how the future may evolve and how this might impact your strategy? What specific metrics are you tracking to determine whether you need to adjust your strategic choices?
6. What data, insights and tools are you leveraging to develop, monitor, and adjust your strategy? How are you leveraging AI to drive to outcomes faster and/or better manage your resources?
7. Which specific elements of your strategy feel bold and ambitious? Which reflect more conservative or incremental choices? Was that an explicit choice? 

Good results will likely require sustained effort, often in collaboration with stakeholders and partners, each of whom will need to be mobilized toward a more robust system for strategy development. The result, though, can be a strategy process better prepared to meet the challenges we anticipate will confront business leaders for the remainder of this decade. Because despite all that has changed, good strategy has never been more important. It’s the evolving process for getting there that defines strategy now.

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