The strategy of more than 30% of enterprises in China. If we only discuss Chinese manufacturing companies and foreign trade companies, these six words may cover nearly 60% of corporate strategy.
The second type of strategy is the regional/national/global strategy. This is a market expansion strategy, and it also accounts for a large proportion of China’s corporate strategy.
The third type of strategy is business integration/function integration/regional integration. You often hear similar words, such as “one body and two wings”, “troika”, and “iron triangle”. In fact, behind this expression is to integrate several scattered businesses.
The fourth type of strategy is to adopt a certain new technology. For example, the most popular strategy this year is the data strategy.
The fifth type of strategy is to provide customers with the best service, which is also very common.
The sixth type of strategy is to build a platform or business ecosystem. Since about 2014, with the rise of the mobile Internet and the industrial Internet, many companies dream of building a platform and a business ecosystem.
The seventh type of strategy is to extract a certain part of the function as an overall strategy. For example, the strategy is direct sales to customers, or talent strategy, financial strategy, supplier strategy, etc. Although I believe that such a strategy may be extremely important to a certain stage of the company, but we still cannot extract a part of the strategy to replace the overall strategy.
The eighth, ninth and tenth types of strategies have something in common: they are all targeted strategies. The eighth strategy is what to prevent, the ninth strategy is what you want to be, and the tenth strategy is what level of revenue and sales are to maintain.
After understanding these ten types of strategies, let’s then judge which of these ten types of strategies are strategies and which ones are not.
To judge whether an expression is a strategy, there is an important basis: can this strategic expression guide all aspects of the company’s strategic decisions? Let’s analyze a few examples.
The most frequent one is called low-cost strategy. When will the low-cost strategy be most effective? That is, when we face multiple competitors, if we can serve price-sensitive customers with a lower cost structure than our competitors, we can acquire more customers and win the competition. So the important value of low-cost strategy is that it can help us gain a place in the competition.
If the company starts to consider diversified layout, or consider finding the next business growth point, then the low-cost strategy obviously cannot help us. So low costThe strategy has an obvious scope of application, and can only exert its maximum value in the course of competition.
The same is true for the differentiation strategy. Why do the two strategies of low cost and differentiation become synonymous with many corporate strategies in China?
The famous management master Michael Porter proposed three general competitive strategies in his classic works: low-cost strategy, differentiation strategy, and concentration strategy.
The low-cost and differentiated strategy belongs to the competitive part of the overall strategy. It has played a major role in the field of competition, but it will never replace the major role that an overall strategy can play in the company.
So once we replace the overall strategy with a partial competitive strategy, it will limit the company’s decision-making.
Take another example, everyone often hears: building platforms and business ecosystems. The platform and business ecosystem are more like a visionary goal, just like Ali’s vision is to build a future business ecosystem. Therefore, although this strategy expresses strategic intent and long-term goals, the most important significance of this strategy itself is what kind of strategic logic must be used to achieve the goal.
So, if we make a simple classification of the problems in the top ten strategies, we will find the following categories.
First, we often extract a small part of a certain function, such as competitive strategy, market strategy, or human resource strategy, as an overall strategy.
The second is to treat some ideas and slogans as strategies. For example, I want to provide the best customer service, and I want to be top-notch in certain aspects, and treat these ideas as strategies.
The third is to treat the goal as a strategy, such as what many companies want to become, what to prevent, and how much profit and growth they can maintain.
What do these strategies have in common?
They are all strategies, but they are all part of the strategy. Rumelt also said in his classic book “Good Strategy and Bad Strategy” that many strategies that we call daily are not strategies at all. This phenomenon is in Han>
So we can briefly summarize the logic of Jobs’ reinventing Apple as follows.
First, discard the old logic.
For Jobs, he abandoned two important logics: the logic of competition with Microsoft and the situation where sales dominate the product. These two logics actually violated the first category of misunderstanding of strategy that we talked about at the beginning, that is, extracting a certain part of the whole strategy as the overall strategy.
Second, after discarding the old logic, Jobs reiterated Apple’s mission and established Apple’s new logic on the basis of the mission, which is to provide users with innovative solutions in the end-to-end value chain.
Finally, build products and services on the basis of this value chain.
So on this basis, we express it as the following structure, which is the basic logic and framework of a strategic thinking that we want to convey to everyone at the core of this lesson.
First of all, we must have a starting point, from here to think about our strategy. It must come from our mission, the value and meaning of our existence.
But mission is a relatively abstract concept. We need to embody this mission to the level of business logic in a institutionalized way like Jobs did, and make it a structured business logic.
Based on this structured business logic, there are multiple links. In each link, we problem solving or value creation based on simple rules, so that products and services can emerge.
Five. Conclusion
So far, we discussed what strategy is not, and what strategy is. Strategy is actually systematic and thought-based leadership, plus the creation of value logic.
Finally, we got a three-level framework for strategic thinking: starting from a strategic point, and then structuring the mission into a businessBusiness logic, inject simple rules into business logic, thereby promoting the emergence of products and services.
We also need to know that management is only an eternal question, and there is no ultimate answer.
This article is from WeChat official account:Chaos University (ID: hundun-university) , author: Cui Xiaoming (University of Chaos innovation that experience), editor: Chaos Business University research team, supported by: Jiawan Jun (University of Chaos theory course program Director)