Blog #4: Taking Strategy from Development to Implementation

A key takeaway that I kept getting after completing this week’s readings was at how important it is to clearly define the company’s competitive advantage from the beginning during development and then to the implementation. However, I feel that while crafting a strategy based on a competitive advantage can be done in different ways for a startup than an established company. In the article by Bradley, Hirt, and Smit, I tried to apply the 10 tests of a strategy to the company that I worked at during my internship this past summer (to the best of my knowledge). Like most other companies, I think they passed at most 3 or 4 of the tests, but some cannot be answered yet. The company is a startup and even though I believe these are all important tests to develop a strategy, I’m not quite sure they can all be applied to a startup. For example, the test of translating strategy in an action plan isn’t quite possible yet. We cannot apply a full action plan because we have not figured out all of the processes and mechanisms that will be in place to ensure success. We are still testing and developing new processes to find what works. We constantly must shift our focus and strategy extremely quickly based on the results we were finding, and we didn’t always have time to sit down and develop an entire strategic plan to help drive sales of a new product. Also, we are still working to define the population that the competitive advantage can be applied so once that is defined the other tests may become more applicable.

Even though the company did not pass all 10 of these tests, I believe everyone in the company could easily articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of the business in a simple statement like Collis and Rukstad had stressed the importance of. I feel this is more important for a startup that is still trying to find its niche than the 10 tests defined by Bradley, Hirt, and Smit. For example, all decisions can be based on this statement. If a decision is not supported by the objective, scope, and competitive advantage then it should not be done. It helps ground a new company and keep them focused on the values that got them started and fueled.

I believe that the article by Lafley, Martin, Rivkin, and Siggelkow about applying a scientific approach to defining a strategy can work extremely well with a startup.  All seven steps in the ‘Seven Steps to Strategy Making’ can be applied but specifically the designing of tests and conducting of the tests to make a decision can be the most beneficial to startups. Being able to test out processes before defining a strategy can help save massive amounts of time and money for an organization trying to find a strategy to implement.