Your potential is far greater than you realize
Why is it so important to get into detail on strategy? It’s a simple answer: When your job is to organize groups of people to achieve a task, they have to know 2 things:
1) What do you ultimately want to accomplish? (vision, long-term direction, mission, etc…)
2) What do we need to focus on in order to make that happen? (value discipline, strategy map, brand strategy, positioning)
After you create the direction, the work of communicating and aligning ALL of your resources to the direction is a much larger job than most people understand. It’s what determines how much of your corporate potential you are going to realize. Once you realize that your potential is always infinitely greater than your current performance, you can start to see what planning is supposed to be about.
Wrap your head around this… The greatest reason to plan is because what your organization is currently doing in terms of performance is a fraction of what its potential is. The only way to get there is to determine clever positions of competitive advantage, and relentlessly align your organization to deliver a specific form of value to customers. That’s called planning.