Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?

Can you summarize your company’s strategy in 35 words or less? Would your colleagues express it the same way? Very few executives can honestly say yes to those simple questions. The thing is, companies with a clear, concise strategy statement—one that employees can easily internalize and use as a guiding light—often turn out to be industry stars. In this article, Harvard Business School’s Collis and Rukstad provide a practical guide for crafting an effective strategy statement and include an in-depth example of how the St. Louis–based brokerage firm Edward Jones developed one that has generated success.

Any strategy statement must begin with a definition of the objective, or the goal that the strategy is designed to achieve. Since most firms compete in a more or less unbounded landscape, it is also crucial to define the scope, or domain, of the business. Perhaps most important, companies need to have a clear sense of advantage—that is, the means by which the business will achieve its stated objective.

Defining the objective, scope, and advantage requires trade-offs. If a firm pursues growth or size, profitability will take a backseat. If it chooses to serve institutional clients, it might ignore retail customers. If it derives its competitive advantage from scale economies, it will not be able to accommodate idiosyncratic customer needs.

Before developing your strategy and crafting your statement, you’ll want to carefully evaluate the industry landscape. This includes segmenting customers and identifying unique ways of delivering value to the ones the firm targets. It also calls for an analysis of competitors’ current strategies and a prediction of how they might change. The key is to find the sweet spot where the firm’s capabilities and customers’ needs align in a way that competitors cannot match.