Strategy Simple

The complicated can be made straightforward as in this article from the Harvard Business Review.

An excerpt.

“My partner Mats Lederhausen, formerly worldwide head of strategy for McDonald's, introduced me to "Strategy Trees." The concept is, like most useful things, deceptively simple. It forces you to get at the heart of what you are trying to achieve. The "tree" analog comes from the linkage between the questions in a Strategy Tree. Start at the root purpose of why you are doing something and link it to your goal and how you will measure progress. Graphically, it looks more like a series of adjacent boxes…:

“It comes down to asking the "Why, what, who, and how" of your business, arraying it across one page in a way that makes it extremely useful as an alignment tool amongst management or board members. This is hardly a novel concept, but it falls into that category of common sense that is not so commonly done. There are various permutations of these questions, but here are four that I have come to use in trying to summarize the big picture of a portfolio company…”