Part I Path: On the path

In my experience, a lot of creatives find words like strategy, management, value proposition, markets, and sales off-putting and uncomfortable. Some creatives tend to perceive commercial interests as the polar opposite of true creativity, a distracting and disturbing factor that will detract from the creative outcome. While it can be exactly that with a bad brief or an inexperienced client trying to micromanage the creative output or provide feedback like “Can you make the logo bigger?”, if there is no commercial attachment to the creative project, it will be very difficult to make a living out of it, which is what most creatives dream of.

It's a balancing act of nurturing and protecting the creative vision, and attributing value to the work done. To achieve this, you will need a plan that guides you towards an outcome worthy of your efforts, whether it's a plan for your role in a larger team or a plan for your business, with strategy serving as the long-term plan.

Unfortunately, strategy seems to me to be one of the most overcomplicated topics in business, although it's probably with good reason. As a result, the execution of a strategy fails more often than it succeeds. And when the strategy isn't working, it’s tempting to try and explain it in even more detail. As Alex Smith points out in his book No Bullsh*t Strategy, the truth is that most businesses struggle to implement their so-called "strategy" because it isn't even a strategy at all. They confuse having a strategy with goals or hitting KPIs. This misunderstanding is surprisingly common among both large corporations and small businesses alike. 

A real strategy is more than just a buzzword or a checklist; it is a clear, actionable plan that guides decisions and drives processes towards success. Frustratingly, companies that do have a strategy tend to overcomplicate what it is. This means that it's usually hard to understand, which in turn makes it difficult to execute, and difficult for employees to take responsibility for their own tasks and improvements. 

So why does this happen so frequently? Simple, clean, and effective strategies often sound too basic to work, or too unimpressive to have spent months on, so instead, they are bloated with slides and lots of fancy words that make it sound smart. Of course, it's fine to argue the strategic choices with data, charts, insights, and evidence, but the strategy itself should be super easy for everyone to understand, remember, and execute on a daily basis. The good news is that even though so many get it wrong, by applying a bit of effort to defining your strategy, it will probably turn out just fine. Just keep it simple enough to understand and remember, and from there, communicate it well to those who have not been involved in writing it.

A good rule of thumb is that a strategy's only purpose is to inspire action. When you know where to go, it becomes easier to find new ways to get there, and the more clearly it's defined, the more it inspires action.

Who remembers the strategy anyway?

Strategy is the map to how a business is planning to succeed. It's why your customers choose your products or services over the competition. Put simply, strategy is a means to an end. A goal, on the other hand, is how we measure progress. For example, if your goal is to double your revenue within two years, everything in your strategy should guide your decisions down the right path to achieve it. For this to work, your strategy has to be easy to understand for everyone who is contributing to the progress.

Strategy is all about being clear on what value you are adding to the world, why people gravitate towards it, and defining your own unique space. Its purpose is to improve your odds of success and staying alive as a company. Simple, right?

Not really, I know, but the process of developing a strategy will greatly improve your chances of succeeding, and a good strategy is truly nothing more than a series of choices that impact different parts of your business. When you change one part, it affects the others. The only problem is making the right choices since our ability to look into the future is still somewhat limited by the lack of time machines. Instead, we will have to make an educated guess and see where that takes us. Choices are not only what we are going to do, they are also about choosing what not to do. Some of the strongest strategies make brave decisions about what the company is not. Look at Patagonia; they made numerous strategic choices that put ethics and environment above short-term profit. By not engaging in fast fashion but instead offering repairs rather than selling a new, similar item, they openly discourage people from buying more clothes than they actually need.

In their book Playing to Win, A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, and Roger Martin, a former dean of the Rotman School of Management, call this the 'strategic choice cascade'. One thing leads to another, impacting the next step. The effects of the next step in reverse also influence the adjustments that should be made to the prior step to fine-tune it. Continuously making adjustments along your journey will help you tune your strategy until you've found your recipe for success. It's also a learning process. As you gain new insights into your market, the situation changes, or your company grows, it will provide new opportunities which might demand adjustments.

Fig.01 From How Strategy Really Works, an integrated cascade of choices.

To chart your own path, there are choices that you will need to define and understand deeply when designing your business, and the same goes for your clients. You will need to decode and research to identify their choices, or lack of, to contribute value to their company and goals.

The first element of strategy is the destination: a definition of what success looks like, a definition of where we are heading, and why. The next is what category we are in and who it is relevant for. Lastly, we need to define the value that is provided for the customer in the chosen category. From there on, it's about tactics, trial and error to test and tweak your strategy until all the choices complement each other and it becomes coherent.

Fig.02

Simple is not easy. As a creative, you know this. The more you strip away from the design, the stronger the concept has to be for it to shine by itself. In my companies and projects, this has been one long journey of trial and error, especially in the beginning, and it will probably be the same for you if you are just starting out. 

In this section of the book, I have carefully put together a combination of what I wish I'd known about business strategy back when I was starting my own creative business, while stripping away the more complex elements to make it as relevant as possible to you. It's my take on strategy based on experience and what I found to be effective during the last 20 years, complemented by the insights gained from working with companies. These ranged from small one-man webshops where you can change and influence almost all aspects of the business, to global multi-billion dollar companies, with thousands of employees where you only affect a tiny fraction of a huge operation and the strategy was way beyond my reach.