This is probably even more common than tracking activities as a way to tell if you’ve picked the right strategy. For many organizations, the only way to tell if a strategy worked is to look at lagging outcome metrics like revenue, profits, or market share. It’s true that often these things are the ultimate goal or reason for the strategy. However, by the time you find out if the strategy worked, it is too late if this is all you measure."
It’s amazing to me how little thought and logic go into many strategies I’ve seen in big organizations. Often the overall goals for growth, market share and profit are handed down from on high by the executives, board, or parent organization. We usually don’t have much say in these, regardless of how stupid they might be. For example, I remember talking with a well-known Fortune 100 technology firm right after the internet bubble burst in the mid 1990s and they still had a goal of 50 percent sales growth over the previous year! (Moi ici: Been there saw that) The best and easiest way of spotting a bad strategy is logic and reason. It’s hard for outsiders to understand how some big smart organizations can make such stupid decisions sometimes when coming up with strategies. Apparently some of these strategies are decided on without much in the way of a logical analysis. Some organizations rely on the nice diagrams with circles and arrows called “strategy maps” to think through their strategies. These diagrams are created in flipcharts with a team of experts and they look very scientific, but most are nothing more than a series of broad assumptions drawn on charts with arrows used to indicate causal relationships.
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# 3 Best Practice For Spotting Bad Strategies – Better Strategic Metrics"