Good Corporate Strategy – Everything You Need to Know

Hi, I’m David Burnie, Founder of Burnie Group. I lead our Strategy and Operations practice.

One of the questions I often get is, What is the strategy? And how can Burnie Group help us build our corporate or business strategy?”

For me, a strategy is all about deploying resources effectively and making choices. So, when we work with an organization we frequently think about how can we help an organization take the limited resources it has and deploys that in the most effective way. Often that starts with the problem. What is the problem your company is trying to solve? or in another way, what is your mission and vision? Frequently we find when we work with a company that they haven’t defined the problem they are trying to solve. They don’t have a very clear mission or vision, and they haven’t gone through the thinking to ensure that what they are doing really resonates with their customers.

One example, we worked with a client who is a very data-driven organization and they were doing quite well, but what we found was all the data they were collecting was extremely valuable and could be deployed in a much better way if they really became an insights-driven company. The data became the foundation for insights which were much more valuable for their customers.

When we work with companies, we think about a process where we first go and define the mission and vision but then we’ll actually work with them, assess the current environment, we’ll look at their competitors, regulation, what’s going on in the industry, customers, consumers, and really understand their industry as a whole and what the opportunities are. How it’s growing, how it’s changing, how technology will impact it going forward.

Once we’ve done that, we’ll have a very inclusive exercise where we bring all the leadership together, we’ll roll up our sleeves,  and we’ll educate them on everything we’ve researched. Helping them start to make some informed decisions. How do you prioritize? What are the opportunities? and how do we as a leadership team align on what opportunities we as an organization want to pursue?

Then, once you’ve identified what those opportunities are we essentially have a set of strategic initiatives. We can then work very closely with an organization to put plans in place to build out those strategic initiatives, what we would call a roadmap.

Focusing on the short term, medium term, and long term. We can put together very clear action plans to help an organization go after those strategic opportunities and deliver on the strategy that we have built together.