Strategy is like the word design. That's a problem we should all be familiar with. ;)
There does seem to be value in emphasizing a capital S Strategy, which is what we are all referring to quite naturally, but not forgetting the small s strategy which is the heart of it having value or not. It has to enable you to act for strategy to be valuable. Peter makes good points; for your strategy to work, it needs to be a good how to, including knowledge of Vision You wouldn't believe how many people with strategies can't envision a successful end state. Point-of-View Peter called it philosophy, but I've always heard it called point of view (both sound odd to me now.) It's really about Who are you, and how do you do things. Google is search, Facebook is social. If they both do people search, they will solve it via their point of view, be it keywords or network connections to determine relevence. Plan of Attack How do you choose what to do? Knowing vision and POV, you select a series of hihg level activites hat move you toward hte vision Sequencing I htink this gets forgotten (maybe because it feels more tacticile) but I htink chooosing what you do first, second and third is a highly strategic choice. All companies are resource constrained, and everythign you do is someone else you don't do. So you have to pick what comes first. On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Barbara Ballard <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Jan 6, 2009, at 7:18 AM, Christina Wodtke wrote: > >> ... you could even simplify that to "Strategy is the plan for how to" > > On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Peter Merholz <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm wary of reducing strategy to just the plan, because, as we all know, > > plans often (usually?) need to be changed once you start acting. That's > why > > philosophy and vision are important -- as you change your plans, you have > a > > foundation that helps you maintain appropriate focus. > > I had a blog comment that replaced the original "compete" with > "succeed", which seems like a good solution. > > I think that the term strategy is terribly overused. For example, we > are moving into a new office. We created a bit of a plan of all the > things we needed to do. Did we have an office moving strategy? I don't > think so. > > Now our office location might be part of our strategy. We're close to > downtown, in an interesting part of town, accessible by bike, bus, > foot, and car. It's interesting enough for designers to be happy, > while being cheap enough to make me happy. It's on the side of town > that makes for an acceptable commute from nearby Kansas City, where we > can get a supply of experienced employees without forcing them to > move. > > But I don't think that office location is part of our strategy. It is > a specific tactic associated with the "be a great place to work for > great UX folks who don't want to move to major design/tech centers" > strategy. That in turn involves understanding various reasons why our > target employees might not want to move, including family. So we have > other tactics associated with that strategy. > > > ~~~~ > Barbara Ballard > [email protected] 1-785-838-3003 > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [email protected] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
