Why and How Challenger Brands Succeed For Brand Leaders

The challenger brand model is a strategic approach to a market that works for brand leaders in a market to own and consolidate their unique offering within a market.

The fundamental premise of challenger brand model is that is a business strategy for the whole whole business, not just the marketing and sales process is strategically focused in carrying the whole routes to market into a true partnership throughout the entire value pipeline.

This shift is about partnership proactive participation in the challenger attitude within a market. The challenger model creates a new value stream ultimately to customers, but actually to all stakeholders involved in creating the challenger position within a market. Challenger brand models are actually not just about sales people selling in a different way, but far more; they are about businesses identifying that in maturing markets defining their premium and sustainable position within that market.

 

The challenger brand model has four fundamental underlying principles for it to be successful. It is not just about selling, having challenger sales people, but about changing everything about the organization.  

For a company to start its journey into the position of challenger brand. the first principle is that whole organisation must make a step change in their attitude and approach to their customers. If the culture of a business is purely sales focused then moving it to a relationship one is a simple evolutionary step, but moving to a challenger one is not a simple next step, but a cultural shift, a huge leap of faith and complete organisational cultural shift. This step change is one reason why many companies aspire to being challengers within their market, but in reality they are still transactional relationship in nature.

The debate is one of nature versus nurture. Can a company move away from simply selling what they have, to identifying and developing long term customer values, what tomorrow’s customer is going to value within a brand. Can the organisation communicate its true values rather than selling what it has today.  Putting it simply; can a company walk away from a short-term sales culture to challenge industry perceptions. In my background I have worked for brands that have achieved that, and seen brand’s such as Patagonia sustain the challenger market position successfully and change the market to their challenger position. Premium brands achieve the challenger positions through visionary leadership and sustain it by creating champions throughout the whole industry, not just through sales people selling differently to others.

The second principle of successful challenger brands is that everyone within the brand has engage in conversations with stakeholders to shift the mindset of an industry. Complete belief from within the whole team of the company culture is a must. That creates a sector tension within any market. Apple, that iconic challenger brand took on Microsoft and others, by challenging the status of computing as technical, Apple made them simple and beautiful. They work for us, not us for them. That tension with customers and the whole supply chain successfully challenged assumptions and took that challenger role from computers to phones, watches and even TV’s, redefining the markets within which it chooses to compete.   

For challenger brands to succeed they must challenge with a uniquely defined position within a market.  Belief and education are central to challenger brands success. Everyone must believe, not just the sale person, but the whole organisation must have a unified cultural belief in the challenger position.

Engagement and communication must be clear and demonstrate the innovation which the challenger brand operates.  Simon Sinek talks about the power of WHY, when describing Apple’s approach to the market. The brand’s ability to communicate at all levels creates interest and desire within target audiences. Target audiences, those who just get it, become converts to the way in which a challenge brand operates creates people with a passion, converts who believe and can communicate that belief clearly. 

Education is at the heart of successful challenger brands. While they create factual and emotional arguments which people buy into, they can sustain and develop their challenger position. Education is not just talking to passionate followers or clever innovations, it is far more. It is the continued striving to re-enforce that challenger position, what it is why it matters to all stakeholders and how it differentiates the brand from other and form other potential new entrants or alternative options. These are most effectively delivered through insights into customer behavior inextricably linked to core causes and themes, which that challenger brand espouses.  This continued consistent communication re-enforces the challenger brand’s position and moves the brand from innovator market positions into aspiring early majority markets of both intermediate channels to market and audiences.  

Successful challenger brands, defend their market position, not through hostile language, ‘we are better than you because….’ But through resonance with audience types personalities.  Each challenger brand’s communication sounds like ‘people who value XYZ value us because we resonate with their values’.

That resonance is not designed to appeal to everyone, in fact successful challenger brands focus on key target segment consumer motivations. They sacrifice the majority status quo and look to occupy premium places within markets which are defensible and sustainable. They look at tomorrow’s market needs and drive behavioural shifts in customers attitude to brand engagement. Apple’s drive into apps, live streaming, integrated products and services, all move audiences into engagement with the brand in a different way than any other ‘computer’ company.     

Control, and taking control is therefore at the heart of a challenger brand’s success. Communication is only relevant if it engages with those who can influence decision-making. Effective communication by challenger brands is about controlling the communication where and when it matters.  Challenger brands focus on communication only where they can successfully challenge, they converse on their ground and in their language. They create a new language of products and services not to differentiate but to identify the value they deliver in their unique language, so conversing inside the brand becomes an integral part of buying into the brand.

Challenger brands only talk about value, challenging the customer’s thinking and pre-conceived perceptions in their decision-making process.  It is never negative, always a positive solution being provided by challenger brands. The irony being that they most successfully challenge when they do it non-aggressively and non-directly. They don’t look to compete in the same way as the industry norms, but through looking at challenging the status quo in every way. That approach creates positive tension, the implied question is why would you not buy this brand, this way of life, rather than buy us over them.

Third principle that makes challenger brands successful is that they are premium players within any market. That requires a complete integration of attitudes and approaches within the company and its complete supply chain. Challenger brands are always premium players, they invest in being in the space at the top of the market, and the price they charge is a result of their challenger success. It is investment into innovation in both product, service and value chain activities. Being a challenger brand also relies on the brand investing in its customer targeting of key prospects, not just end customer segmentation but also in every step in the customer journey. That creates an targeted up-front prospecting and focused pipeline management   Those investments result in higher closing ratios than industry averages.

Becoming a challenger brand within a market requires the right type of people, and this is the fourth principle behind a successful challenger brand. Traditional order takers and short-term management and leadership people will not ideally fit with a challenger sales brand. So moving a brand, or creating a challenger sales brand requires an organizational shift in behaviours, competencies and capabilities across the whole company.  Changing behaviours of all employees takes time and leadership, it does not happen over night and measuring the results is not easy.  Rather than just measuring the sales, the leadership need to measure the quality of the customers and the engagements that occur. 

 At the heart of becoming a challenger brand is to understand the unique position which that position within the market it delivers.  Brands such as Apple, Patagonia and Tesla have all successfully taken clear positions within their respective markets’ by being challenger brands. By changing the established perception of a market, challenger brands succeed because they deliver more value at every point of the relationship. It takes a strategic long-term approach for a challenger brand to achieve that success, and that takes leadership with vision.

Learn more about how to develop strategy click the link to buy the book:-

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Leaders-Successful-leaders-business/dp/1508761965

Strategy: The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Leaders-Successful-leaders-business/dp/1508761965

Strategy

The leader is the person ultimately in charge of defining the corporate goals of any organisation. It is the one role which a leader cannot delegate.  Strategy is the course to take to achieve your organisation goals. Without a strategy any organisation drifts aimlessly within its market, loosing its position and its customers. A clear set of goals allows a strategy  to be developed to achieve those goals, enabling the organisation to focus, find its direction and pull together towards those goals. 

Strategy: The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay provides both the hard tools to assess and develop your goals and strategy and the soft tools which enables leader's to successfully implement those strategic shifts within their organisation.     

Leading From the Front

It is difficult to lead if you don't know where you are going and in this book, Richard Gourlay explains how to use key tools and concepts to assess your market and define your goals and set your direction of travel. How to weed out the noise which often drowns the clarity of thinking which leader's need to see where markets are going and enables them to define their vision for their organisation. 

Leading from the front can only happen if a leader is confident of where they are going and why they are taking that route. This book provides that clarity of purpose for leaders to assess and understand how to define what matters form what does not so that they can step up and out and lead from teh front.

Strategy: The Leader's Role 

In Strategy: The Leader's Role each step in building your vision, goals and strategy is explained with relevant tools and aids to enable you to develop your own unique strategy to fit you and your organisations circumstances. 

From assessing your core competancies as an organisation through to understanding where your market (s) are going. Strategy the Leader's Role explains in step by step chapters how to undertake your own assessment with models an examples of how others have achieved their strategy.

Tools include external market assessments well as internal market assessment tools to create strategic options. How to assess your organisational capability as well as how to use theses to create a strategic advantage. 

To buy this business book, just click the image or the link below:-    

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Leaders-Successful-leaders-business/dp/1508761965

Strategic Vision Drives Organisations Success

Drive Your Vision or Amlessly Drift 

In today’s world, driving your business vision is the only way to ensure you stay focused on where you want to go and not pulled by short-term fads and fashions. 

The words strategic planning used to mean a once a year offsite discussion about where the organisation is headed. That thinking would be turned into an updated business plan with expectations and outcomes to be delivered over that next year. That type of strategic planning the corporate away-day provide very little in the way of strategic thinking and subsequently provided no or very little strategic value. Corporate away days became more a morale booster, with team building and bonding as the only measure of development. The reason why was very simple, if there is no strategic intent, no strategic review or re-evaluation them there will be no strategic outcomes.   

Strategic thinking is more vital today for leaders of organisation than ever before. The need for organisations of any shape and size to be able to determine why they exist and where they intend to exist in their market has never ben stronger. Whether it is new players finding their first footing in their market, through to established players redefining where they are within their sector, the need for leaders to define their vision and validate their strategy to achieve that vision has become more critical than ever. The drivers of urgency are not just those of ever more powerful stakeholder expectation, but more demonstrably the globalisation of every market sector and the transparency of strategy in what it delivers to business. 

Problems with Strategic Thinking

The problem building a long-term strategic plan, the traditional cycle of business planning is that it is too long and therefore slow to react to rapidly changing business environments; particularly the slow speed of implementing traditional business plans, which has damaged the reputation and credibility of strategy. 

The slow pace of organizational change driven by traditional strategic business planning results in strategies which are out-of-date before they ready to deploy. 

The net result of this process is that organizations are sluggish to respond in fast-changing markets, left wrong-footed by new entrants in dynamic, high-growth markets leaving leaders frustrated and impotent in competing with agile, new entrants. In an technology driven world where disruptive online behaviours enable markets and customers to change overnight, thinking strategically can seen to be an outdated way of thinking.     

Developing effective strategies is vitally important because without them organisations become inward looking, focusing on efficiency at the expense of growth opportunity. Without strategic thinking leadership teams becomes operationally efficiency driven rather than customer focused.  

The key element of strategic thinking is the ability of leadership teams to look at what is driving change within any sector. Inspiring vision is about drawing intelligence from scratchy, vague or even 'invisible' data to make informed decisions about tomorrow's market and develop an aspirational strategy to achieve that vision.

Planning for Tomorrow

What do we know about what tomorrow will look like and what opportunities it will offer? Here are my five defining statements about the need for strategic thinking:- 

1. It will happen whether we like it or not.
2. Markets are always changing, new opportunities are always arising.
3. If organisations strategically plan ahead they can successfully compete, rather than just survive by being a me too player.
4. Strategic thinking has to be achieved and implemented faster than a market is developing if players wish to stay or move into more profitable, growing and sustainable market segments.
5.  Without strategic thinking every organisation will go backwards in its market.

The Strategy Gap

The strategy gap: the lack of proactive strategic thinking is most often blamed on the lack of hard data 'facts' as the basis of making defined decisions. This has always been a factor in undermining the confidence leaders have in making plans for the future. 

As a result, strategic planning often focused on predicting the future based on historic trend lines, over-invest in gathering all available data, and produced a small number of safe directives often focused around the very near future, for the rest of the organization to execute.

This safety first approach to strategic planning leads to little steps, but is not really strategic thinking.  

"Genuine strategic thinking requires leaders to think of the future not based upon the past, but based upon the future market potential".   

With the advent of the internet there is now huge amounts of easily accessible affordable good data which is instantly and cheap to acquire. The world today has become a turbulent place, speed of change is no longer slowly evolutionary, but has become rapidly revolutionary in virtually every market. 

This has left the traditional strategic planning process with a fundamental problem, since the trusted, traditional and slow approach to strategic planning is based on assumptions that no longer hold. The static strategic plan is dead.

So why do strategy at all?  

Strategy is therefore under pressure as a process unlike never before.  If the outputs from traditional strategy, a traditional business plan with incremental evolution are no longer valued, then the value of strategy is being rightly questioned.  

The reason why strategy is not dead is that the strategic process, the way strategy is developed is essential in learning what is ‘right’, what is the future in a business sector.  This strategic approach to step out of your organisation and look at the market, defining internal aspirations and building the steps through experimental activity and forward pattern development enables shift culture to occur enabling agile strategy to be deployed. 

There are many renaming ceremonies for today's strategy process, all focusing on the move to redefine the strategic planning process, away from the traditional top-down long-term evolutionary strategic planning process to quicker, dynamic and responsive strategic thinking culture. This systematic and seismic shift in thinking away from process driven top down command and control process to one of continual strategic thinking culture. 

To make this shift to modern strategic thinking, leaders need to move away from traditional predictive planning to rapid prototyping supported by multifaceted experimenting.     

The second shift is that of 'frontline first' where leaders must enable the frontline with real decision-making authority. Successful strategic thinking requires objective and direction setting with a whole team focus.  Instead of a plan, the planning process is about whole team involvement in the mindset of goal achievement.              

The third and final major shift leaders need to focus on where the organisation is adding value to customers. As markets and customers rapidly change, who would have thought Google, the online search engine would be producing driverless cars, or Apple the IT company is managing middle-class health. 

What value any organisation customers value and are looking for is one of the major shifts which today's digital age is driving.   

 https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Leaders-Successful-leaders-business/dp/1508761965

How to move forward as a leader

Leaders Must look beyond the Horizon for Success: 

(Five Tips For Moving Beyond Certainty in Business)

It is always easy to look backwards and see how a business has evolved to where it is today, than to look at where a business is today and predict where it will go in the future. Looking backwards from essence of an idea, to the formative stage in which it was created and how it has evolved to where it is now, journeys look logical and rationale. When leaders look at their business, the rational behind the direction setting they took seems obvious today and makes perfect sense, but the truth is that at the time of making those vital decisions it was not.  

Making decisions about the future is never easy and certainly not simple. The lack of information about the future, the uncertainty of what will happen within any sector and the singularity of ownership of the big decision weight on leaders minds often leads to procrastination and delay.

Seeing beyond the horizon, to what the world will look like in three to five years time requires leaders to look beyond today's certainty over the horizon into uncertainty if they wish to succeed. What makes some leaders succeed in moving beyond the known is not just having an idea, but to create sustain and drive towards their passion. Being willing and able to think beyond the known an visible to see a world which does not yet exist.

I am sure you have seen the list of six famous failures, from Albert Einstein to the Beatles. All of whom ended up succeeding, but at the time of their big decisions they were unknown, from Walt Disney who was fired from newspaper for "lacking imagination" or Oprah Winfrey who was demoted from being a news anchor because she "wasn't fit for television".  If they had listened to only those voices where would they be today. Would the Beatles have bounced back from Decca records, would Steve Jobs have fought back to success having been fired from his own company by the man he hired, had they not had the determination, advice and courage to make tough decisions about the unknown future.    

There is a simple phrase which I often use when talking with directors as a mentor, "What's your Vision" and within that simple three word question I am asking a whole series of questions about the leadership I am talking with. Who are they, where are they going and most importantly of all why do they think they are right?

Here are five business tips to help leaders move beyond the certainty of their role.

Five Business Tips for Moving Beyond Certainty

1. Create your Vision!  (Define your destination, goal or dream which you believe you can deliver)

2. Collect people to believe in you and your passion and abilities. (Successful leaders surround themselves with people who believe in them, challenge them and keep them on the ground throughout their journey)

3. Keep being curious and challenge the status quo. (Its Not why, but why not?  Success as a leader is always about challenging, to see new and emerging opportunities).

4. Stretch the limits and push beyond your comfort zone. (If you believe in something you must push beyond the known to open up new possibilities, you can only do this if you stretch yourself)

5. Keep researching your vision (Leaders too often create a vision and then stop developing, stop redefining and stop seeing how the market is changing until their vision fails)

These five #businesstips will help leaders see and move beyond the certainty of what they can see in business and develop the #mindset and #robustness as a leader. Leadership is not a natural gift, its takes time and continual investment in development and redeveloping your skills to face and succeed in leading people to face new challenges beyond the certainty of what already exists.  

• Like to know more about #leadership skills then click here: www.richardgourlay.com/leadership-is-all-about-vision-2/
• Read more blogs by Richard Gourlay: 

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• Learn more about Richard Gourlay: www.richardgourlay.com/author/richard/

Regards

Richard Gourlay

Working ON Your Business NOT IN Your Business

Working ON Your Business not IN Your Business

The pressure on directors and leaders to be not only great role models but also to be involved in every aspect of the business. But successful leaders in any sector, no matter their personality or background, always have the ability to focus ON their business rather then IN their business. What does that mean in reality and if it is so successful why do directors get pulled into their business so easily, and what to do about it. 

Directors: Being Pulled from Pillar to Post

The urge for directors to jump in to your business as the chief fire-fighter or executive management is the most natural reaction any director or owner has when it is under pressure to demonstrate their leadership. 'Keep calm I'm in charge' is the key message leaders want to portray. That position of fire-fighter extraordinaire (superman without the lycra) the man (mainly) who can, is a powerful pull to keep leaders hands on, but its also one main reason why companies don't succeed.   

Directing is what a business expects directors to do in demonstrating their leadership skills. From making the big decisions through to setting an outstanding example to others, the pressure is always on to be seen be in the control and to be the ultimate arbitrator of problem solving. The problem is that while firefighting looks and feels vitally important, spending time working out why things have gone wrong is actually what is ultimately important, and what we directors should be investing our time and energies on solving.   

The hardest task in doing the right thing as a leader is to know how and when to stand back and not get drawn into the day-to-day stuff in any business, by ensure they stay directing and making the future happen successfully. Its always easier to pick up someone else's ringing phone rather than educate them to do do it, but in doing so you've just become a firefighter rather than a director directing. Successful leaders have to learn how to stand back and understand what is happening and how to direct people to change their behaviour to change their activity to change outcomes.

Being a director is an official role, often a badge of great success and a role of not only legal significance but also as a role model of leadership. Leadership, the act of leading is about directing others towards an agreed shared goal, and that is where leaders deliver results. 

The best leaders are the not the ones people see, but like great teams, from sports teams to kitchen chefs, where everything happens as if by magic and no-one can see how it is done, but like a great orchestra everyone knows their place, their role and how they contribute to the overall success of the business. 

Directors: On It! Not In!

Working ON the business, deciding where the organisation is going and why rather than IN, getting stuff done, is where people really see the value of an effective leader. That requires leaders to focus on both where they are going as well as how they a business is operating. 

The biggest mistake leaders can make is wanting to be seen to be busy in the business. Being seen as doing something within the company process, directly adding to the value chain, while it is being seen can lead to the leadership looking sight of its real role, that of leading not working in. Being a 'hands on' person is one of the classic perceptions which people inside a company feel they need to deliver to be valued.

Directors Need to Be Seen 

I've just worked with an advanced manufacturing client to develop an operations director who said in response to my suggestion "I can't be seen to sit down and read how to do something new, I have to be busy doing something so all my people can see me working hard." This classic trap, of having everyone working IN their business leaves no-one working On their business. Its an example of the classic challenge for leadership of being seen and being seen to be busy.

Being seen and involved in everything is part of being in charge, and able to offer advice, make decisions and drive people towards their objectives. The effect of having to be always seen is that directors have to be first to arrive and last to leave, draining the batteries of many directors particularly in rapidly changing companies.

Where being seen becomes the culture of leadership, suddenly everything has to be run past them which leads to vertical management structures, creating a lack of empowerment throughout the organisation which results in reduced moral and hierarchy control, putting further pressure on directors and undermining ownership as deference to authority becomes the normal acceptance. This change makes all decision making hierarchical, creating control and in result reducing flexibility to respond to changes, which no-one, the leadership, is now looking out for.

The other common problem with being seen all the time, having your door open at any time is that directors become the only people able to make decisions, resulting in increased pressure on directors to know what is going on. This pull factor into the day-to-day and the politics of micromanagement eats resources and kills innovation.  

Successful leaders understand the importance of being seen effectively in business today is more about communicating when you are available and that you are available to them to provide dedicated support not just being there for people. Being seen therefore in today's business world is about being able to provide quality of time support not just volume of time. Keep your distance from the day-to-day, don't walk all over the management process and respect people's talents to solve problems rather than tell them how to do things.  

Leaders must 'Know What's Going On'

Directors have to know what's going on, but the danger is that if you are working in your business as a director, then you can be a bull in a china shop, wildly spinning round treading all over other people, who aren't directors, and their roles.

Directors getting involved in every detail of every process within the business can lead to a culture of  micro-management. Micro-management, where every decision is analysed and scrutinised by directors, not only undermines good employees but often leads to reactionary and damaging over-rullings of effective processes and procedures. Which leads more often than not on the process breaking down.                                                                                                                                              

Knowing the process and how it works is vital for success, but micro-managing processes often lead to confusion on decision-making and the over-ruling of the existing tried and tested process.

What makes successful knowledge of what's going on, is the ability to see the process happening and recognise where it is under-pressure and where it needs resources to deal with the pressure points.

Being able to step back and see what is happening while not being dragged into the process is a vital ingredient for directors to lead from a position of overview knowledge not micro-managing detail, leave that to those who run each section. Let them own their area then they will care about it. Review how people are delivering and working out what support they nee rather than walking all over what they are doing unless things are going seriously wrong is the best behaviour leaders can demonstrate. 

Leaders MUST Lead By Example

'Lead from the front, lead by example,' is first rule of any leadership development course.  But it is also a phrase which is poorly understood, here's why:

'Leading by example' is one of the most commonly misunderstood terms leaders fail to appreciate and causes the biggest mistakes directors make in doing their job. When directors are told to lead by example they look at  the role of the person they are demonstrating their leadership skills to and then they lead them by doing that person's role, not theirs. That 

In doing that person's role they are not leading but replacing that person in doing the role. The result is that in leading by example directors do, but don't lead. Doing someone else's job is not leading or directing it is doing, the trap which anyone can of fall into, particularly when we are busy, under pressure or when we see someone not doing it as they should.

'I'll do it so it gets done,' mentality is the quick fix, but not the right solution. How will they learn unless they do it, not only in theory but day-to-day. The best help you can give someone is to train them how to do a job and ensure that they know why they are doing that job, reward them for doing it and motivate them to do it even better, but don't do it for them (unless you want to swap roles).


If you would like to learn more about how to work on your business as a leader and avoid becoming a leader working n their business, then click here to learn more:  http://www.richardgourlay.com/leadership-is-all-about-vision-2/

Or click here to see more blogs on google+: https://plus.google.com/+RichardGourlay/posts/eSKmfKv1qL9

Or click here to see more about us at www.cowdenconsulting.com

many thanks

Richard Gourlay

Strategy V Culture - They Aren't Opposites

Strategy v Culture – They Aren't Opposites 

Is culture more important than strategy, or is strategy more important than culture?

This classic question has grow in the mindset of leaders in recent years as the rise of culture in the workplace is recognised for its importance not only in improving performance but in driving whole enterprise competitiveness. For anyone familiar wth the McKinsey S7 model will know that the shared values within any organisation ultimately drive the delivery of both the hard 'S' factors, (strategy, systems and structure) and the soft 'S' factors (skills, staff and style). 

McKinsey 7S model for ANY Business

The focus today on culture over strategy is really a misunderstanding of the importance of strategic thinking in business. The relationship between strategy and culture is in fact  one of mutual dependence. Without a clear strategic vision in place, thoroughly developed by the leadership team, then no amount of investment in culture will deliver improved bottom-line business performance.  

Culture, is actually an integral part of delivering / implementing any business strategy. If you cannot motivate people to successfully work together, to be more than the sum of their parts then the leadership team cannot deliver its strategic vision.  Therefore strategy and culture are mutual partners in any successful enterprise. What you do, matters just as much as how you do it. Simon Sinek's the 'Power of Why' is an excellent explanation of the mutual nature of culture and strategy combining. 

Is Business Strategy Failing?

So why do so many organisations quote that only 20% to 30% of their strategic initiates succeed? Figures such as these immediately make leaders think about culture as the primary driver of successful organisations, rather than focusing on strategy. The additional value of culture as a driver of enhanced performance within a sector is primarily seen in high-value service led west-coast millennial businesses, (which are the ones always quoted), by cultural advocates who so often tag brands such as Apple, Google and Facebook. 

While looking at these types of new business, its easy to see their culture at work and how it improves performance within the workplace, but what underpins every one of them is that they have their successfully developed strategies in place, which underpin and drive their success.  

The passion with which these organisations promote their cultural identify would make it look as if their success is due solely due to their unique culture, but if that was the case then companies such as Bebo and Myspace would also be quoted as outstanding examples of success in west-coast culture. 

The Cultural Advantage 

A positive and rewarding culture can drive a successful strategy deployment quicker and more dynamically than their competition. This type of competitive advantage can deliver  rapid emergence of a new entrant, or accelerate a high-growth competitive business within a dynamically developing market. 

The key aspect of a vibrant company culture is that it creates an inspiring work-place, which enables the rapid deployment of a strategy coupled with the flexibility to respond to change quicker than the competition, often through empowerment of employees to take ownership of decision making at the front-line.

This cultural advantage in business enables those businesses able to enhance their cultural identity to outcompete their competition in emerging and rapidly developing markets effectively, but it does not replace sound strategic thinking, it just supports and allows rapid acceleration of a strategy being delivered successfully. There is in effect a symbiotic relationship between a successful strategy and the culture within which it is delivered.    

Those leaders who focus on culture rather than strategy are chasing the defining differentiation within the market, rather than the fundamental definition of any business. No matter in what sector you are operating within without a fundamental strategic purpose no business can succeed. 

Results Only Work Environments ROWE

Dan Pink in his excellent book DRIVE talks about Results Only Work Environments ROWE, where employees are free to work on their own projects for a period of their work. The apparent results show that businesses like Google found that about half their profits came from work undertaken by 20% of employees time. 

While this sounds an outstanding impact of culture in driving results, it does not always reflect the reality. The controls put in place within an organisation direct where the employee puts their energies in ROWE, so they are not free, more managed towards projects that fit within strategic parameters. Secondly many projects which people work on are dream projects which enhance the base functions of the organisation, or they department, so that ROWE work extends or commercialises work within organisations rather than is purely derived from a ROWE culture. This is not to decry a ROWE culture, which can be inspiring but it is important to understand that ROWE cultures are not a panacea for success.   

Culture cannot replace strategy, it might camouflage a weak or lapsed strategy for a short time, but no matter how much spirit there is within any workplace without a long term strategy no business will succeed. While cultural evangelists passionately quote Apple, they quietly forget Nokia or Motorola as organisations, who both had positive cultures, Motorola invented the mobile phone and Nokia was the definition of innovation for many years, but who have been let down by strategic failures.     

Strategy development, an often misunderstood leadership skill-set, has become a phrase to describe everything from an aspirational dream through to a quick win tactic. This ubiquitous  usage of the word of strategy attaching it to everything has heavily damaged and de-valued it, compared with the fairytale soft skill cinderella which is culture.   

Strategy Defines An Organisation's Purpose

Success is not just about having a clearly defined strategy, it is about having a strategic intent within the leadership which makes an organisation able to succeed. If the leadership has a clear direction and focus for the business, combining both the external view rigorously developed integrated, coupled with the internal focus on core competences, then that business can outcompete its competitors. 

Organisations led by strategic thinkers who focus on growth within their sector, by looking beyond the horizon and developing a clear understanding of where their market is going and therefore how to develop an advantage in their market. How the leadership use those advantages, how fast they can develop and implement strategies, relies upon the belief others have in that strategic vision.                 

Without strategic thinking, organisations will not succeed, here's why. Strategy underpins success, not just because it provides a focus for all activity within an organisation, but organisations with a strategic purpose attract the best talent, develop the best talent to deliver and retain the talent by providing them with a results focused purpose to stay and develop their talent further. 

Without that ability to provide a purpose for talented people, they will not come, develop or stay. That ability, which only a strategic drive can deliver, underpins the purpose of an organisation, its the clear goal focused approach, which drives the existence of a positive cultural environment, where the value of culture can make a difference in competitive performance.       

           

The Solution

Fundamentally leadership is about driving change, and that can only come from the leadership themselves.  You can't  delegate strategy or structural change, you have to own it live, believe it and drive it relentlessly until it achieves not a paper model but a realisation in achieving tangible outcomes towards strategic goals. Building the 'strategic model' is not strategic leadership, that is just dreaming it, it is the  'built it and they will come' approach to strategy.     

Having a great strategy is only a small part of the real challenge which leaders face. Being able to execute their entire plan, requires the ability to visualise their strategy as the big picture for the business and being able to communicate it to all levels of stakeholder with personal conviction which creates and sustains the momentum you need for your strategy to succeed. That means by beginning with the end in mind, that clear strategic objectives which fit into the future which the leadership team must believe in and focus on with ambitious and measurable goals.

Successful leadership must engage all the people throughout their organisation, so that hey all understand the strategic drivers that are creating and driving the market within which they operate. Only through open and frank discussion can leadership teams enable employees to understand the drivers and implications of change within the organisation will they be able to carry people through the change process successfully.

Summary

It is not the case of culture eats strategy, if you look at successful businesses and organisations around the world, a great strategy, well thought out resourced, driven and supported will deliver bottomline results. Great strategic thinking, creates, nurtures and sustains dynamic cultures within organisations, which in turn drive strategic thinking to new heights, creating brand leaders in every sector of industry. But short-term thinking and a lack of investing in leadership skills, robust strategic thinking processes and people investment will continue to hamper the success of strategy in business today.

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