How can we distinguish between good and poor strategy?

This question was raised on LinkedIn a while ago and received massive feedback from professionals from a wide variety of industries.

One of the respondents answered the question by referring to a blog by Roger Martin for Harvard Business Review and argues that a good strategy “provides the road map to future with data driven sign posts. It tells you what to do and which way to move forward depending upon key big events (e.g. if Event A occurs we will move to doing this and if Event B occurs then we will move to doing that)”.

This view gained a fair share of support in the discussion and other participants provided their insights by claiming that the major difference between a “good” and a “poor” strategy comes from the execution of the strategy. “An excellent strategy (on paper) which is poorly executed is always worse than a fair strategy which is exceptionally executed”, a participant claimed.

Another participant stressed the importance of building the strategy upon the company’s existing capabilities and resources and the opportunities and threats posed by the environment.

The reason why I found this discussion interesting is that, although strategy making goes thousands of years back, we are still struggling in defining the term – let alone distinguishing between a good and a poor strategy.

Furthermore, most of the answers on LinkedIn seemed to be made on the following two assumptions:

•         Strategy is prescriptive.
•         Strategies are developed at the top of the organization

Therefore, in my next posts I will challenge these two assumptions and come up with alternative strategy development processes.