A phenomenon of ‘strategic drifting’ can happen almost undetected, taking the business slowly offline with its markets and positioning.
How do you detect strategic drift?
You always need to see a fit between what you do and your customers’ needs. Invariably, the fit is evident in your costs to reach customers and the turn rate of your products on your sales scorecard.
Further, the more fit you have the higher the propensity of market adoption of your new offerings. Lack of traction on the above is a sure sign that your strategy has gone into orbit.
Re-strategise or lead?
The lead-time to re-formulating strategy and embedding it is long and tangible results may only be seen later.
Leadership, on the other hand, is instant, hands-on and gets the troops realigned to a new reality much faster.
Organisations are creatures of habit. Old behaviours in people take time to change and can frustrate strategic rejuvenation if not led with conviction from the
top team.
Focus on the right scorecard
The early days of strategic refocusing requires galvanising coordinated actions across the business to prepare it for a new strategy.
Measure and reward leadership for communicating and driving a new vision, structuring and aligning teams and being hands-on, before you focus on performance metrics.