Analyzing Your Corporate Strategies

A corporate strategy is essentially a broad and general plan for implementing your corporate vision – building the company that you described in your corporate vision statement. In your corporate strategy statement you are essentially saying in broad and general terms: “This is how we are going to implement our corporate vision”.

Usually, the business entity needs not one, but several corporate strategies each detailing a specific functional area of your company. Marketing strategy, financial strategy, operational strategy, risk management strategy, information and knowledge management strategy and personnel management strategy.  Plus the general (‘umbrella’) corporate strategy.

Obviously, every corporate strategy must meet the same requirements as your corporate vision statement. Which means that, in addition to being comprehensive, logically sound and adequate (it needs to fit your KEF in particular, the whole reality in general and common sense), your corporate strategy statements must provide a powerful drive for your employees to maximize their individual performance, aggregate corporate performance and to transform your business into a powerful money-making machine – and to make it stay that way.

Whenever you are dealing with a portfolio of corporate objects (in this case, of your corporate strategies), you must think about the ‘quality-of-fit’ (synergy) between the objects in this portfolio. In practical terms, it means that you must maximize the synergy between your corporate strategies.

Another very important ‘quality-of-fit’ issue is the match between declared and actual corporate strategy. Your company may not have the declared (‘written’) strategy, but it always has the real, actual, ‘unwritten’ one. Which in most cases happens to deviate very far from the optimal one. Therefore, you must always make sure that (a) you always have the right declared strategy and (b) your declared strategy always matches the actual one.

Obviously, all of your corporate strategies must match your corporate vision statement in a sense that they, indeed, lead your company to implementation of the desired corporate vision.

By itself, your corporate strategies statements are useless. To be useful and valuable to your company they must be tightly integrated into your strategic and operational planning and overall decision-making – to make sure that every decision and action in your company fits your corporate strategies and brings you closer to implementing your corporate vision. In other words, you need to develop and deploy a highly efficient corporate process of using your corporate strategies in your strategic and operational management.

Like practically any other corporate document, your corporate strategies are not set in stone. Significant changes in your external environment may require making changes (possibly significant) to your strategies to maximize the aggregate performance and financial value of your company.

You perform the analysis of your corporate strategies in much the same way as you analyze your KEF function (see above). You use APS for corporate strategies find answers to CBA questions (supporting them with linked relevant documents), complete the corresponding ACRC sections, assign scores to individual questions and develop and implement financial and operational plans for optimizing your corporate strategies and maximizing their value for your company.