3 Strategy Questions You Must Ask

February 22nd, 2012

Photo courtesy of Leo Reynolds http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/4786076648/in/photostream/ 3-strategy-questions | Photo courtesy of Leo Reynolds http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/4786076648/in/photostream/ The best management teams incorporate at least three key strategic questions into almost every operational and status discussion.

That’s according to Art Petty, a career coach and strategy consultant, who says that “the gross majority of the dialogue in an organization is about ‘how,’ and ‘who’ and ‘when’ and the important ‘what and ‘why’ issues are left for strategy meetings and other high-level discussions.”

He says that if these teams will ask these questions, they’ll “dramatically increase the quantity of meaningful dialogue (and action) taking place every day.”

Here are the questions:

  1. How does this initiative help us grow the number of new customers, revenue from current customers and revenue in market share?
  2. How meaningfully different is this to our clients?
  3. How defensible is our approach versus our most dangerous competitors?

We agree.

Petty’s ideas are perfect for marketers who are leaders or members of a team. How often have you been in a meeting and heard a great leader say, “Hold on. How can we make something happen to wow our client?” or “What is the thing that we can do here that will make the biggest impact?”

When deadlines are closing in, we marketers especially tend to get in firefighter mode and start stressing out. We need to start asking “why” and “what”  a lot more often.

Source: Management Excellence, November 2011

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