Clever Geek Handbook
22 September 2025

Audience, Relevance, and Search

Recommendation

Even if you’re the next William Shakespeare, if you don’t write according to online standards you will fail as a web content creator. Internet users will not just ignore your web content; they probably won’t know it exists. This savvy new Internet writing guidebook by IBM web pros James Mathewson, Frank Donatone and Cynthia Fishel covers all of the technical information you need to develop web content that Internet users will find relevant and engaging. The authors emphasize that quality web content – material people can find and will read – depends on the right keywords. BooksInShort recommends this superb, readable, wholly practical guide to editors, writers and those who plan and create material for the Internet.

Take-Aways

  • Different media require different writing.
  • Writing offline and writing online are as unalike as writing in different languages.
  • Online users will abandon your web content if they find it irrelevant.
  • Seed your web writing with keywords to ensure reader relevance.
  • Web content design should be search-friendly.
  • Tailor your web text to fit Google’s search engine and people will find you.
  • Online users, in effect, “own” web content. The person who wrote it does not.
  • Web writers should structure their websites around the keywords that searchers will use to look for them.
  • Google’s PageRank, which increases your page’s hit frequency status according to its number of external links, is as crucial in web content planning as keyword research.
  • To maximize its inbound links, your website must become a “hub of authority.”

Summary

Web Writing Is Not Traditional Writing

The web can be a difficult environment and many professional writers do not understand how to write for it. Three primary rules of writing for the Internet align with the habits of web readers: 1) Be brief; web readers have short attention spans; 2) Readers find content through search engines, so choose words search engines can find; and 3) Readers enjoy passing content on to others, so provide links. Some other important considerations:

  • The web is a vast universe of unstructured content – On the web, relevance is paramount. With infinite choices, readers will focus only on what matters to them. Design your web content for search engines. In functional terms that means: Write for Google. When you do, your material will be relevant to your website visitors. Plus, they will be able to understand it and “act on it.”
  • Web users evaluate your words to check for relevance – Flowery, figurative or highly technical words and terms will send readers elsewhere. In traditional media, writers are in charge of the terms they use. Web readers establish what “they think” a particular word or phrase means. Internet readers thus “own” web content and Internet writers do not.
  • The web is filled with incorrect information – Web readers are skeptical of online content. You must convince quickly them that your content is credible, so include links to respected authorities.
  • Regularly change and improve your web content – Internet readers expect updated information. Upgrade regularly. Searchers perpetually seek new content, so refresh yours as often as possible.
“Writing for the Web is fundamentally different from writing for print.”

You cannot govern the online reading experience. As a newspaper, magazine or book writer, you can assume that your readers regard your material as relevant. Otherwise, they wouldn’t read it. Web readers may land on your web page randomly, bounced in from search engines or social media referrals. Readers spend less time reading web pages than print pages. After scanning, online readers give you “an average of three to six seconds to engage them.” If the content doesn’t intrigue them, they hit the back button to chase more relevant material. Offline, you can make an informed guess about the identity of your readers. Online, you haven’t a clue. Your online writing is aimed not at individual readers, but at search engines. That’s how readers find you. Focus on the requirements of interested searchers who seek specific keywords and links.

Keywords

For a web writer, keywords – “strings of characters that people enter into search fields” – are mother’s milk. Keywords may be single words, long phrases or “word combinations.” So-called “long-tail” keywords are highly specific, lengthy phrases. They are designed to draw Internet users with particular interests. To learn about the context of long-tail keywords, visit social media sites, blogs and online forums that are popular with your target audience and your competitors. Identify repeated keywords and phrases. Research keywords using Google Alerts, Yahoo Pipes and Yahoo Alerts. Popular words – or “tags” – that people assign to relevant web content and social media are also helpful.

“Writing for the Web isn’t about what’s clever or interesting to the writer; it’s about what’s relevant to the reader.”

Pepper your main web page and subsequent pages with keywords that matter. Post the specific purpose of your pages – shopping, support, services and so on – in your website titles and links. Add “a verb to your keyword phrase,” for example, “learn about” or “shop for” or “compare.”

Keyword research is a straightforward process. Brainstorm the “seed words” people might use to find information about your topic. Start with the most generic terms. Create “keyword clouds,” keywords that relate to one another. Google AdWords is a good tool for keyword research. Other tools include Keyword Discovery Tool, Goggle Insights and the Free Keyword List Generator. Wordtracker helps you check your competition. Type your potential keywords into Google’s search box. It will show you “various incremental possible matches for your search string,” each matched by the “hits” or returns for each search phrase.

“Learning to write for the Google algorithm is an essential aspect of writing for web readers.”

Make processing easy for the Goggle “crawler” that identifies the keywords on your web pages. Don’t load your pages with a lot of Flash or JavaScript. Instead, use “HTML or XML pages.” Make sure your body text includes the keywords from your titles and headings. Pay attention to metadata, that is, “extra-linguistic information hidden from view in the code of pages.” Some other tips:

  • “Spelling out acronyms” – In print, writers usually spell out a complete name once, for example “Product Lifestyle Management,” and then subsequently employ its initials or acronym (PLM). Don’t do that online. Crawlers look for full terms, so spell out all of them.
  • “Pumping up keyword density” – Make sure 2% to 4% of your body text is keywords, but don’t use more than 4% or you will bore the reader.
  • “Ensuring keyword proximity” – Crawlers respond when keywords are close together. So “managing your product life cycles” is better than “it is important to manage the lifecycle of the products in your portfolio.”
  • “Stemming” – This concerns the “alternative grammatical forms of words.” Example: “stem” forms are “stem, stemmed, stemming, stems” and so on. Using as many stem forms as possible improves search results.
  • “Using synonyms and other related words” – Internet readers will use various synonyms for their search terms. The more synonyms you use, the more searchers will land on your website.
  • “Using descriptive link text” – Make your links as colorful and evocative as your text.
  • “Bolding for emphasis” – Boldface your keywords to reduce bounce.

The “Google-First Methodology”

Many web writers incorrectly try to optimize their web content “after the fact.” That is, they plan and develop their content, then conduct keyword research for search engine optimization (SEO). Then they sprinkle or “seed” their keywords through their pages. For obvious reasons, this works poorly. Content developed without an awareness of the needed keywords may not be relevant to keywords you plug in as an afterthought. Readers who then land on your web pages after typing in keywords will find your content irrelevant and will leave. Google frowns on such keyword seeding. Violate this standard too often and Google “will expunge your page from its index.”

“We are moving from a static print culture to a dynamic web culture.”

Don’t do things backward. First, use keyword research to “learn how [your] target audience uses language.” Then write your web content. This way, you ensure that Internet users will find your content relevant, since you are addressing them in their “own words.” Your content will match their needs. And Google will not ignominiously banish your pages.

Creating Great Web Content

Follow this six-step plan to create the most effective web content:

  1. Establish exactly who your target audience is.
  2. Do keyword research to determine what specific words and phrases your target audience uses to search for relevant web content. Make Google your default search engine for this research.
  3. Create a list of “core words” that are most popular with your target audience.
  4. Create a web page “for each of [these] words.”
  5. Routinely test the pages you create for relevance.
  6. Adjust your web content to optimize its relevance.
“The web is like a library where everything is organized by publisher, and there are millions of publishers.”

Notice how this approach also differs sharply from planning and creating text for print media. There, you passively wait while readers buy your books, or the publications that carry your articles. In web writing, you actively recruit readers by using keywords they search for online.

Make your web content contextually relevant to those keywords so it engages readers once they find your website. You actually do not define your target audience. Instead, you discover its common characteristics. They, it’s up to you to define those traits minutely, that is, focus tightly on readers’ specific interests. Optimizing your website for keywords rests upon having a smart “content plan” that you develop in light of your keyword research. Plan your content the same way a supermarket plans its inventory. Your “content modules” are similar to the products in the supermarket. Your individual web pages are comparable to the aisles of merchandise.

PageRank

Keywords are only part of the puzzle. “PageRank,” Google’s proprietary name for how it prioritizes pages, is every bit as important. The more external links feed into your web pages, the higher Google ranks them. You must promote your web pages to “high-value sites” to get them to create “inbound” links to you. The more links the better, and the more “link equity” or “link juice” your website accrues.

“If you find high bounce rates you will need to revisit your content, choose new keywords and republish – and do more keyword research.”

Google and other search engines see incoming links as “votes” from other websites about your website’s overall quality. You gain credibility with such votes.

To get other websites to link to yours, make your website a “hub of authority.” That requires top quality web content known as “link bait.” Don’t try to trick Google, for instance, by trying to create incoming links by getting other websites to link to yours by promising to link to theirs. Goggle’s sophisticated search algorithm quickly sniffs out such reciprocal arrangements.

“Search-first writing is based on the premise that search engines provide a lot of insights into what is relevant to your target audience.”

The best way to create link equity is to become a respected authority within “the community of site owners” dealing with your topic. Enhance your existing relationships with other authorities in your field.

You can create new relationships by exploiting Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media websites. Remember that you cannot secure links directly from social media websites due to their “nofollow” standard. Google developed an HTML “attribute value” that it attaches to certain social media links, so that any link from them cannot generate link juice. All Wikipedia pages, for examples, are nofollow.

“For every sentence in the English language, there are something like 30 alternative ways of expressing the same thing with different related words.”

Create a blog to showcase your authority and expertise. Tweet about your topic on a regular basis. As the web becomes more of a rich content medium, make sure your website content includes a variety of media, including “PDFs, videos and podcasts.” Use “YouTube [and] iTunes to post content. Touch all of the social media bases.

Web Analytics

Web analytics are statistical analyses that help determine how well your website does in terms of “users’ engagement.” Numerous online tools can help you carry out this calculation.

“It takes a big commitment to thrive in social media.”

Some primary metrics to analyze include:

  • “Traffic” – Page views (how many times people viewed your page), visits (how many people visited your website) and “unique visits” (individual visitors).
  • “Bounce rate” – A calculation of the ratio of visitors who leave your website a few seconds after arrival.
  • “Referral data” – Tracks external referrals from search engines.
  • “Keyword data” – Shows the keywords that people use to find your website.
  • “Page audits” – To improve performance, develop a quality “content summary as the first two lines of your body copy.” Include keywords in this summary.
  • “Engagement rate” – Goes up when people click on your internal links.
  • “Time on the page” – The seconds or minutes someone spends visiting your page.
  • “Site overlays” – Which internal links work well on your site and which ones don’t.
  • “Pathing data” – Shows the links a visitor clicks on while visiting your website.

About the Authors

James Mathewson is editor-in-chief of ibm.com and former editor of ComputerUser magazine. Frank Donatone is an IT professional in charge of improving IBM search rankings. Cynthia Fishel is an IBM expert on interactive and social media marketing.

Read summary...
Audience, Relevance, and Search

Book Audience, Relevance, and Search

Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content

IBM Press,
 


22 September 2025

Dinosaur to Dynamo

Recommendation

Old-economy companies weren’t supposed to survive the dot-com era, but some of the "dinosaurs" adapted and they’re doing quite well, thank you. Accomplished business author David Stauffer profiles 20 old-economy companies that excel at e-business. The usual-suspect behemoths, such as Ford and Bertelsmann, are here, but he also profiles a six-man automobile transmission shop in Arizona, seed stock ranchers in Montana and other less-than-obvious candidates. Stauffer says that every company’s path toward e-commerce is unique, but that path is nonetheless generally approved and determined by management. Thus, change is hard to manage without CEO support, even if the CEO dates back to dinosaur days. So if you run a traditional company - with actual assets - and you want to make that difficult evolutionary stride toward e-commerce, BooksInShort suggests that you might find concise instruction here.

Take-Aways

  • Some old-economy firms understand and embrace e-commerce.
  • There is no one true path to e-services convergence. Every company’s journey is unique.
  • A company’s e-efforts will probably fail without backing from an old-economy CEO.
  • Companies have sustained impressive profit margins and increased customer loyalty through online efforts.
  • Even traditionally non-tech companies can embrace online services.
  • To be successful, managers have to integrate their online and offline sales efforts.
  • You must teach your employees that refusal to change means corporate death.
  • Companies should focus on comparative advantage, because technology can be replaced.
  • For e-commerce to work, employees must be given real freedom.
  • Old-economy companies bring intangibles to the table that most dot-coms can’t match.

Summary

Jurassic Inc.

Despite the hype, old-economy businesses are not doomed and can, in fact, adapt to change and sometimes even outperform their dot-com competitors.

While it’s too early to judge whether these companies will be long-term winners in the 21st century, a close look at 20 brick-and-mortar businesses that embraced the new economy’s wired ways can provide a blueprint for building the modern, connected enterprise.

“The outfits that prospered in the old economy aren’t doomed, but neither can they survive in the twenty-first century without changing.”

These 20 companies all rapidly adopted new technology and are thriving, even as their former dot-com counterparts struggle to survive: Merck-Medco, Eaton Aeroquip, Powell’s Books, Snap-On Incorporated, N-Bar Land and Cattle Company, Inditex SA, Enron Corporation, Rosenbluth International, iSteelAsia.com Ltd., Dovebid Inc., Cemex SA, Charles Schwab Corporation, Tesco PLC, Office Depot, Quality Transmission Service, Antevia Inc., Bertelsmann AG, Ford Motor Company, Eastman Chemical Company and the General Electric Company.

Find Your Own E-Path

Every company makes its way into the digital reality as an individual entity. Every company’s use of emerging technologies will be unlike that of any other company - even those in the same industry or with similar business models.

“If you’re a retailer that wants to leave a dot-com in the dust, structure your clicks to support your bricks and vice-versa. When a big customer can check inventory at the local physical outlet from your Web site and in-store kiosks let shoppers access the Web site, you’ve got a combination the dot-com can’t match.”

Yet, aside from uniqueness, these business profiles reveal eight important facets of every old-economy company’s move toward digital delivery. These key areas of concern are listed in the sections that follow.

The Essential Ingredient

For a digital initiative to grow and prosper, the chief executive has to support it. Less than unflagging support probably means that the effort will fail. The responsibility of executing the plan can fall to someone else, but without continuing, driving impetus from leadership - and a demonstrated commitment in terms of time and money that’s obvious to employees and customers - the effort to digitize won’t be as effective.

“To cope with a famously decentralized structure that creates hundreds of independent fiefdoms, CEO Thomas Middelhoff created the Bertelsmann E-Commerce Group and gave it authority to gather net content from company units in all other communications media, from books and magazines to music recording to television and film production.”

For example, the CEO of Bertelsmann, Thomas Middelhoff, created the Bertelsmann E-Commerce Group and allowed it to gather net content from all of the corporation’s communications media, including everything from books to music to television production. "In Internet time, three months is a year," says Middelhoff. "Make a bad decision or two and you are in trouble." Other companies where strong support from the top enabled the implementation of major changes include General Electric and Eaton Aeroquip.

Enable Employees to Succeed

Give your employees the tools to make e-efforts work. Companies often talk a good game of employee empowerment but don’t really play it. That simply isn’t going to work in the Internet age. Hierarchical command structures just take too long to be effective. The usual time-killing bureaucracies entrenched in most organizations will waste the promise of a good idea. Furthermore, creative knowledge workers will be turned off and probably leave if they find that corporate roadblocks stifle their ideas. Companies like Enron and Schwab, which have really embraced the Internet, are democratic, highly networked, extraordinarily malleable.

Blending Clicks and Bricks

Target marketing and mass customization mean that customers can be segmented profitably in many ways. But abolish online and offline customer categories. For example, the Charles Schwab brokerage firm has embraced the Internet, but not at the exclusion of either face-to-face contact or telephone contact. There is no online customer, no offline customer. There is only the customer. He or she wants to know there’s access to all of your services by Internet, phone or in person - without discrimination in content or fees.

Netheads and Neanderthals

Your business can’t afford an "us vs. them" attitude when it comes to making e-business work. The netheads and the Neanderthals both have to want, above all else, to deliver more business to each other. Suppliers and customers should also have immediate access to their complete transaction records. For instance, the chairman of Office Depot, Bruce Nelson, believes that you should structure your clicks to support your bricks and vice versa. Web site and kiosk access from your store can give you a combination of services that an average dot-com can’t beat, Nelson says.

Marginal Middlemen

Conventional wisdom states that the Internet eliminates the need for the middleman, or intermediary. This includes those people whose positions in the value chain are supposed to have been rendered obsolete by the reality of direct customer links. As a matter of fact, this is happening, but it’s not a pervasive change. Actually, the Internet has strengthened some intermediary roles. The key to the middleman’s survival is whether he provides an added value to the customer or simply increase your costs.

Forget About Size

The benefits of digital technology have nothing to do with the size of your business. When digital services are deployed wisely, they magnify and confer advantages to businesses of all sizes, whether they are small, medium or large. For example, Quality Transmission is a six-person firm but it gets 15% to 20% of its business from new leads generated from the Internet.

Push to Provide Services

Companies that have extensive physical assets aren’t doomed by the increasing value of intellectual or tacit assets, no matter what the generally accepted wisdom states. But old-economy companies can’t simply stand still. It’s no longer enough to make high quality products, although that is the foundation. Customers not only want products, but solutions. For example, by providing services over the Internet, Ford optimally saves about $3,600 on an average $26,000 car.

Be First

Seize the advantage of being first over the advantage of being right. Caution and over analysis can kill a company in the world of Internet time. Prominent new-economy companies, such as America Online, are always failing forward. Speed rules. The chairman of iSteelAsia, Andrew Yao, has already turned his company into a major revenue producer, even though it’s only been around since 1999. We have to accept "the realities of the Internet, to change - and change fast - or die," Yao explains.

“Technological breakthroughs of recent years may provide the means to address or avoid problems as seemingly intractable as the weather or congested traffic.”

Such examples provide key leadership lessons. You and your firm’s managers can learn from their experiences in several areas, including the pluses and minuses of being an old-economy company and the continuing importance of good decision-making, strong leadership and focused customer service.

Old-Economy Attributes

Companies based in the old economy still have many advantages. A non-tech past should not be considered a barrier to a company’s tech future. In many ways it can be a plus, if your managers always insist that your e-initiatives must provide some benefit. For example:

  • Snap-On Inc. demonstrates that established companies have a tacit advantage over tech startups in their supply of brands and reputation. The Internet should be used to tell a whole new world of customers about your established strengths.
  • Traditional companies that have corporate cultures that already engender risk-taking and rely heavily on individual initiatives are well prepared for the digital challenge.

New Economy Opportunities

The Internet makes it much easier to convey product differentiation. For example:

  • N-Bar Land & Cattle discovered that it could win buyers based on the virtue of added value. Your Net presence can also greatly improve your customers’ sense of community and your brand identity.
  • The management of Quality Transmission believes that the Web shouldn’t be used only for selling, but that it can also be employed to establish intangible assets, such as goodwill and credibility.

Making Decisions

Often, confronting change to make the best use of the Internet forces companies to consider issues they needed to think about anyway.

  • The owner of Powell’s Books believes that while it may be true that your old-economy culture slows things down, that can be an asset if it actually forces your company to think through the consequences of the new technology that you’re trying to utilize.
  • Companies shouldn’t leap into new technologies just because they’re new, according to the leaders at Rosenbluth. First, you should decide how this technology fits your company’s unique culture and comparative advantages.
  • The CEO of Bertelsmann says that while there is always a chance that your Web services may eat into some of your traditional business, it’s better for you to do the eating instead of your competitors.

Leading People

You can’t just change your technology; you have to teach your employees how beneficial this change is for the firm and for them individually.

  • If you’re an older manager, seek formal education about new technologies either through workshops or classes. Reverse mentoring might work as well: Consult younger workers who have grown up with this technology all of their lives. Don’t be too proud to get e-educated.
  • Employees may resist the executive who pushes for change and acts as the agent who prods the organizational behemoth into new realms. To ease resistance to change, employees must understand that methods have to evolve or the company will die.

Serving Customers

Always work to improve service to your customers.

  • Cemex defines customer service as flexibility in ordering and tighter delivery guarantees. Your firm will benefit from having greater operational efficiencies and happier customers.
  • You should build your site to suit your customer’s preferences, not your own, according to the management of Merck-Medco. Make your Web site accessible and useful to all visitors - including those who choose to stick with brick and mortar for their purchases.

About the Author

Business writer David Stauffer  heads the corporate writing firm Stauffer Bury Inc., in Red Lodge, Montana. He is the author of books on AOL and Cisco, dozens of articles in leading business periodicals and hundreds of annual reports and other corporate communications. He can be reached by e-mail at sbi@wtp.net.

Read summary...
Dinosaur to Dynamo

Book Dinosaur to Dynamo

How 20 Old Economy Companies Are Winning in the New Economy

Capstone,
 


22 September 2025

Strategy Pure & Simple II

Recommendation

Michael Robert presents a well-organized plan to enable you to produce a distinctive strategy. He emphasizes the need for strategic thinking, which sets out a vision of where your company is going. Use this as your basis for making the appropriate choices and plans. Clarify what your company is, and is not, to avoid becoming scattered and overextended. Robert uses the metaphor of playing a game as his framework. Every CEO must carefully choose what game to play, and how to craft a strategy to make and shape the rules. To illustrate these principles, Robert draws on actual examples from client companies, alternating a step-by-step guide to strategic planning with brief case studies that demonstrate strategic thinking. BooksInShort recommends this book to top executives and managers in large companies.

Take-Aways

  • The best way to compete is to develop a distinctive strategy that enables you to change the rules of the game.
  • Never imitate your competitors, always change the rules.
  • Use strategic thinking to create your organization’s strategic profile, which defines who you are and where you are going.
  • To successfully implement a strategic vision, you need the commitment of others in top management and of those who will enact that vision.
  • Strategic thinking creates the framework for deciding what your company should be in the future and for attaining that objective.
  • Combine strategic thinking with good operational planning.
  • When you use strategic thinking to set your company’s direction, consider your products, customers, market segments, and geographic markets.
  • Strategic thinking lets you discover your company’s strategic heartbeat.
  • To identify your driving force, select the single strategic area that impels your company.
  • Your strategic area is the heart of your company’s identity.

Summary

Why You Need a Distinctive Strategy

You need a distinctive strategy because it will enable you to get into the best competitive position, which is having no competition at all. Don’t play the game the way your competitors do. Instead, develop a distinctive strategy that changes the rules in your favor.

“The best competitive position to be in is to have no competition. That position can only be achieved by not playing the game the way your competitors play the game, but rather by formulating and deploying a distinctive strategy that changes the rules in your favor.”

Many companies use a strategy based on imitation, that is, using a competitor’s strategy, and then trying to out-market, out-sell, out-manufacture, or out-service them. This is the worst strategy to pursue. You end up in a race in which each company alternates being the leader. The race never ends, and no one wins.

“If you are not the leader, never play the game according to the rules the leader has set. Otherwise, you are certain to lose!”

To be in the best position, don’t try to gain at your competitor’s expense by using imitation. Develop a distinctive strategy of your own that produces a change in the rules of the game in your favor. To change the rules, out-think your competitors instead of trying to overpower them.

Companies that use this distinctive strategy successfully are found in every industry. Turner Broadcasting turned away from a standard broadcasting approach and instead created a new strategy based on news programming, and on satellite and cable links. Southwest Airlines rejected the hub-and-spoke system that other airlines favor and opted for a point-to-point strategy in selected markets.

“Imitation may be the finest form of flattery, but it is the worst form of strategy.”

When you adopt your distinctive strategy, you will neutralize and paralyze the industry leader you are competing against. You can force it to regroup and rethink its strategy. Consider how Canon changed the rules of the copying industry game when it decided to sell small machines rather than leasing out large copiers, Xerox’s standard practice. Xerox’s share of the copying market went from 97% in 1980 to 13% five years later. As in a military campaign, you can do much better if you surprise the enemy by changing the rules of play. Thinking strategically can be the difference between who wins and loses in business as in war.

Becoming a Strategic Thinker

Many people use the term strategy in different ways. They think of strategy as goals and tactics, or as operational planning, although that is a different activity. The term "strategic thinking" actually refers to the kind of thinking done by a firm’s CEO and other key executives about how an organization will look in the future. When you engage in strategic thinking, you shape and clarify your organization’s future strategic profile.

“A company does not gain at the expense of a competitor by imitating, or cloning, that competitor’s strategy, but rather by crafting and deploying a distinctive strategy that changes the rules of the game in its favor.”

That is not the same thing as strategic or operational planning. Rather, you are creating the framework upon which you will build your strategic and operational plans. This framework will define what you want your company to be; strategic planning outlines how you are going to get it to become what you envision.

“What wins in business is not trying to outmuscle competitors with brawn, but rather to out-think those competitors with some brainpower.”

When you combine the strategy (what you want to do) and the operations (how you want to get there), you end up with a strategic thinking matrix. For your company to prosper, you need both a sound strategic vision and skillful operational planning.

To make strategic thinking work in your organization, you need the commitment of your company’s key executives, along with the commitment of everyone else responsible for implementing that vision.

The Major Obstacles to Thinking Strategically

Learn to avoid the key obstacles to strategic thinking. Be aware of these traps so you can avoid them. One obstacle is fuzzy thinking, which occurs when managers see their company’s future in different ways. The leadership of your company needs to have a unified vision of the future.

“By changing the rules of play, you neutralize and paralyze the leader.”

The second obstacle is created when top managers allocate their time incorrectly and spend most of it dealing with operational issues, instead of dealing with what the business should be.

Being reactive instead of proactive is a barrier to decision-making. Prosperity can discourage future thinking and planning. Short-term thinking, or getting trapped by quantitative planning, can pose other obstacles. The tendency to be overly optimistic, to see the future through rose-colored glasses, can blind your strategic thinking.

Creating the Future Profile of Your Company

To use strategic thinking to set the direction of your company, start with four key elements:

  1. The nature of your company’s products.
  2. Customers.
  3. Market segments.
  4. Geographic markets.
“Do not play the game according to your competitors’ rules. Surprise the enemy by changing the rules of play! If the enemy is constantly surprising you, this is a clear signal of a defensive reaction. Change it. A proactive strategy constantly surprises the enemy and keeps the competitor in a defensive position.”

Next, consider your capital, people, skills, facilities and technology. They are all part of what goes into developing your products and reaching out to your customers in different areas and market segments. Your profits, earnings and dividends are your output; use them to measure your success.

“Strategic thinking is the framework for the strategic and operational plans.”

Ask yourself important questions concerning what products to offer to specific groups of customers. Determine which particular market segments you want to handle and which geographic areas you want to include.

More importantly, consider what products you do not want to offer, and which customers you don’t want to reach. This way you can understand your company’s strategic limits. Making the distinction between who you are and who you are not enables you to allocate resources accordingly.

Identifying Your Driving Force

Analysis can show you the underlying driving force or strategic heartbeat of your business. This is the central momentum that pushes your company forward to produce certain products and to reach out to certain markets and customers. To identify this driving force, select only one particular element or strategic area that impels your company. This is the heart of what your company is about. This core will give you an edge in the marketplace. If you select more than one central driving force, you will become scattered and your efforts will be fragmented.

“Strategic thinking produces a vision, a profile, of what an organization wants to become, which then helps managers make vital choices. It enables management to put the corporation in a position of survival and prosperity within a changing environment.”

Every organization has to consider about 10 strategic areas in determining its focus. These are:

  1. A product or service-oriented strategy (focusing on a specific product, such as in the automobile industry).
  2. A user or customer-based strategy (focusing on a particular category of users or business customers, such as Johnson & Johnson’s strategy of making products for doctors, nurses, patients, and others).
  3. A market type or categorized strategy (focusing on a market category, such as American Hospital Supply’s focus on marketing to hospitals).
  4. A product capacity or capability-based strategy (focusing on a strong investment in production capacity, such as a paper mill, hotel, or airline).
  5. A strategy based on technology or know-how (focusing on a distinctive hard or soft technology, such as chemistry, like 3M).
  6. A strategy centered on a sales or marketing method (focusing on getting orders to customers in a particular way, such as door-to-door or direct-selling like Avon or catalog sales like the QVC Home Shopping Network).
  7. A distribution-centered strategy (focusing on a unique way of distributing products to customers, such as a telephone company or food wholesaler).
  8. A natural resources-oriented strategy (focusing on access to or use of natural resources, such as an oil or mining company).
  9. A strategy based on size or growth (focusing on growth for its own sake or on economies of scale, such as W.R. Grace and Company).
  10. A monetary strategy focused on returns or profits (focusing on profits above all, such as a conglomerate or financial company).
“For strategic thinking to be successful, it is necessary to obtain the commitment of others who will be called upon to implement that vision.”

Which one currently fits your company’s driving force? Should your strategy have the same focus in the future?

Maintaining Your Strategic Drive

Once you identify your central driving force, your overall decisions must comply with that strategic drive. To ensure that the strategies of individual divisions in your company are compatible with that of the whole company, you need to communicate to prevent any overlaps between strategies. Otherwise, you are apt to pursue a schizophrenic strategy, in which you zigzag along, pursuing one approach at one time, another approach another time. Be clear what element of your business dominates your strategy.

Stick to your strategic path and avoid being seduced by opportunities. You may be attracted to some detour because the numbers look good, but losing focus will pull your whole company off course. Be aware that each driving force requires you to develop different key skills to implement your vision; management skills often are not readily transferable from one business to another.

Expressing Your Strategic Vision

Once you have clarified your strategic vision or driving force, state it clearly so everyone in the company knows what it is. Often mission statements are expressed in vague generalities, such as: "The mission is to provide products and services of superior competitive quality and value and to achieve strong growth in sales and income." You must be very concrete, concise and exact when you state your strategy, mission, purpose, or mandate.

State it in a paragraph or two. Your first sentence should clearly identify the driving force that gives your company a strategic and distinctive advantage over your competitors. Then state the nature of the products, customers, marketing segments, or geographic markets that contribute to this vision.

In addition, talk about growth and success, since every business needs to grow and seek success. Finally, your vision statement should describe the present condition and the future intent driving you.

With your strategic vision clearly in mind, cultivate the skills and competencies that contribute to achieving this vision. These abilities are your special expertise or area of excellence. Pick two or three areas of excellence to develop. These will become the distinctive capabilities that give you an edge over your competitors.

The particular areas of excellence you want to develop depend on the driving force behind your company. For example, if you are guided by a product concept, focus on product development and sales or service. If you are guided by a user or market-class strategy, become skilled in market and user research, and promote consumer loyalty. If your driving force is technology, develop an expertise in technology research and application marketing. If you are focused on a sales-and-marketing strategy, become especially good in sales recruitment and selling effectiveness.

In short, your goal is to develop those skills that fit your strategic vision. Use this focus to leverage your unique set of capabilities based on your driving force and on the areas of excellence throughout your company. This enables you to apply your distinctive advantage to the largest number of products and markets, and helps you succeed by letting you shape the game. Your strategy and your areas of excellence give you control of the sandbox in which you are playing.

About the Author

Michael Robert  is the founder and president of Digital Processes International, a consulting firm with 60 partners in 15 countries. He has consulted with major companies, such as Caterpillar, 3M, and GATX. He is the author of six books, including Product Innovation and Strategy Pure & Simple: How Winning Companies Outpace Their Competitors. His writing has appeared in many business magazines and journals.

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Strategy Pure & Simple II

Book Strategy Pure & Simple II

How Winning Companies Dominate Their Competitors

McGraw-Hill,
 



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