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Defining Your Strategic Intent
By Julie Gerstein
Dec 28, 2005, 16:10
Any successful business—large or small—didn’t achieve success on good ideas alone. Succeeding in the business world requires what professors Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad term “strategic intent.” Strategic intent, they explain, is a business’ long-term, far-reaching goal. In order to determine your business’ strategic intent, you must not only consider what you want in the next five or ten years, but what you want to accomplish in a 50 year timeframe.
For example, decades ago, Coca-Cola’s strategic intent was for there to be a Coke within the reach of every human being on the planet. This seemed like a crazy idea at the time, but think about how prevalent Coke products are these days. By setting a developing a vision of the future and developing long-term goals, Coca-Cola made enormous strides in developing their brand.
The main tenets of strategic intent planning are direction, discovery and destiny.
• Sense of Direction includes an understanding about the long-term market or competitive position that a firm aims to build over the next decade. Your sense of direction should be a view of the future that conveys a unifying and personalizing sense of direction.
• Sense of Discovery. Your strategic intent should retain a sense of discovery and excitement about the future. This helps create a competitively unique outlook and gives employees the opportunity to explore new competitive territory.
• Sense of Destiny. Strategic intent has an emotional edge to it and it should be a goal that both you and your employees perceive as inherently worthwhile.
But strategic intent is not just a concept; it’s also a three-step process.
• Set the Strategic Intent (having all three characteristics stated above).
• Set the Challenges: find appropriate challenges and communicate them to the entire workforce. These challenges are the means to get into the Strategic Intent. (For example: Suppose the Strategic Intent of Google is: Allow end users to access all of the information of the Internet with the click of a mouse. A strategic challenge could be: Come up with a search engine capable of producing accurate search results.)
• Empowerment of the Strategic Intent: The strategic intent works best when everyone is invested in its goals. Managers and business owners should keep in mind the “wisdom of the anthill” and challenge traditional downward communications styles.
Defining your strategic intent clarifies objectives for both you and your employees. By setting out your strategic intent, you make clear your company’s goals and help set the path for future successes.
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