Comment by splittingTimes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by splittingTimes | Hacker News Reader

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I am always missing good, positive examples of what are and _are not_ "Goals", "Stratgies", "Missions", "Visions", "Key Results" etc in those articles. And where to start from and where to go?

What is a goal?

"Win in the market place" or "Become profitable" No, that is not a real goal. That is pure business survival.

"Increase market share by %X." or "Grow our portefolio to enter the premium segment" That sounds more like a goal to me.

Then, agreed, a strategy is how you do that. Those layers are really important and who has ownership of those layers. For example, to me the lowest layer are concrete "actions". Those are better defined from the workers that are close to the production and less from management. A higher, more starting layer, are the "guiding principles" the company will follow.

Example: "Grow portefolio". Two strategys how to do it. Either "Grow by aquesitions" (whole companies or external expertise) or you want to "Grow by in-house innovations". Those two "guiding layer" strategies will lead to wildly different action layers.

I would rather say that company strategy is a chosen position on the main tradeoffs. Obviously you want to do all the good things and none of the bad things and execute everything well, but in some aspects you have to pick which nice things you're ready to sacrifice for other nice things, and the set of those decisions is essentially your strategy.

From your examples, I'd rather say that "we want to enter the premium segment, even if we have to lose marketshare on the low end to get there" or "we want to increase marketshare even if we have to stop being profitable for a year or two to get there", that's strategy. "Increase market share by %x" is not a strategy but a goal, in that sentence the strategic choice would be the intent to focus on market share instead of revenue or efficiency or other markets, but not the percentage rate of the increase. The choice of when to enter or leave a major market (either product or geographical or audience) is a strategic one, where you often need to make a significant long-term commitment or it's not worth doing.

For another example, you can have a very profitable company with high volume and low margins, and for the same class of product you can have a very profitable company with high margins and low volume, however if half of your company is pushing for quality at the expense of costs and other half is pushing for efficiency at the expense of quality, your product or service will be uncompetitive at both of them so you want to make a company-wide strategic decision on that and communicate it to ensure alignment, instead of letting each part of the company (e.g. the workers that are close to the production) pick the tradeoffs that best suit their silo but contradict each other.

Thank you for your reply. I really like your framing of the "what it a strategy" definition problem and the examples. That's what I was and still an missing. You also describe very much the struggles that can be seen at companies.

Did you write more down somewhere or read more on strategy that informed your position on it? Would love to read up on that.

As Marc Andreessen said in a recent Joe Rogan podcast the goal of vision is to “form and reinforce the cult”. You need to trick employees into believing in something. Cults and cult leaders are exceptional examples for corporations to learn from.

Isn't exactly the cult aspect that prevents you from making real improvements and grow? You get no critical feedback, no worthwhile reflection on what works and what does not. So you do less adjustments and cannot reach the optimum as fast.

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