How your strategy is

Can you summarize your company’s strategy in 35 words or less? If so, would your col- leagues put it the same way?
It is our experience that very few executives can honestly answer these simple questions in the affirmative. And the companies that those executives work for are often the most successful in their industry. One is Edward Jones, a St. Louis–based brokerage firm with which one of us has been involved for more than 10 years. The fourth-largest brokerage in the United States, Jones has quadrupled its market share during the past two decades, has consistently outperformed its rivals in terms of ROI through bull and bear markets, and has been a fixture on Fortune’s list of the top companies to work for. It’s a safe bet that just about every one of its 37,000 employees could express the company’s succinct strategy statement: Jones aims to “grow to 17,000 fi- nancial advisers by 2012 [from about 10,000 today] by offering trusted and convenient face-to-face financial advice to conservative individual investors who delegate their finan- cial decisions, through a national network of one-financial-adviser offices.”
Conversely, companies that don’t have a simple and clear statement of strategy are likely to fall into the sorry category of those that have failed to execute their strategy or, worse, those that never even had one. In an astonishing number of organizations, execu- tives, frontline employees, and all those in between are frustrated because no clear strategy exists for the company or its lines of business. The kinds of complaints that abound in such firms include:
• “I try for months to get an initiative off the ground, and then it is shut down because ‘it doesn’t fit the strategy.’ Why didn’t anyone tell me that at the beginning?”
• “I don’t know whether I should be pursu- ing this market opportunity. I get mixed sig- nals from the powers that be.”
• “Why are we bidding on this customer’s business again? We lost it last year, and I thought we