Thinking Your Way Through Strategy: Helping The Landscape Company Grow

‘Strategy’; Henry Mintzberg from McGill University defined strategy as “a pattern in a stream of decisions” to contrast with a view of strategy as planning,[3] while Max McKeown (2011) argues that “strategy is about shaping the future” and is the human attempt to get to “desirable ends with available

I learned a long time ago if you want to be a successful green industry company, you must remove “UH-OH” from your vocabulary and instead replace it with…Oh Yeah! I have a strategy on how I will do it!. A successful company does not gain its way to market-share by accident. While not a sports fan, I often choose to use sports analogies to find them very fitting for business conversation. Like an athlete; picking a game he or she can win and then honing skills to play that game more successfully, the company seeking a strategy looks to build on its strengths and its prospective market opportunities by choosing the path that encompasses both. Inevitably, this means choosing not to do something that you want to do. At the same time, that might be a difficult decision for some individuals, or companies, particularly those in fast-paced markets or new service sectors, with many opportunities and few certainties.

Nonetheless, being clear and consistent about where to play and what field to play in, you must take the necessary steps toward building a coherent strategy, where everything the company does fits well together and, in the end, serves the customer with the best possible service delivery.

It would help if you remembered a clear and coherent strategy would provide the necessary foundation for the organizational design process. Without clarity about the who, what, where and when, (the way the company creates value), one cannot possibly define the “how” (the way to organize to create value). Would you like to learn how to build a strategy for your landscape-snow company? Give me a call at any time.

Looking for a good book on the subject, suggested reading;

• The Visionary Leader: How to inspire success from the top down.
• Susan Bagyura (Author), Michael E. Gerber (Foreword), Fiona Dempsey (Illustrator)