Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: Forming Superware's Strategic Plan

Neil Benson: [00:00:00] Learn how my team at Superware used Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy to reset our strategic direction for the new financial year. In the most recent half, just just gone. We landed a major consulting project, but the product market fit for our industry Apps was still elusive. I'll walk you through how we diagnosed our biggest challenge, built a guiding policy and aligned our team around a set of coherent actions. If you've ever felt like strategy is just buzzwords and vision statements, I hope you'll enjoy this episode. 
Good day and welcome to Practice Leading for emerging and curious practice leaders of Microsoft partner businesses. If you're anything like me with an unquenchable curiosity and zero tolerance for BS, you've come to the right place. 
Hi, I'm Neil Benson, and this is my personal invitation for you to join me on my journey of discovery. Together we'll learn from [00:01:00] innovators and investors, executives and entrepreneurs, business leaders and business coaches that have already left their stamp on the world and those that are exploring new and smarter ways of building their businesses. Whether it's groundbreaking innovations, hiring high performing teams, or the sheer force of will to disrupt our industry.
Each episode is a masterclass from the trailblazers who have achieved significant success. Find Practice Leading at practiceleading.com/follow and learn from the bosses you wish you had earlier in your career. At Superware, we kicked off the new financial year today. Actually yesterday, July 1st, today, July 2nd, with a fresh round of strategic planning.
We had just landed a major multimillion dollar multi-year consulting engagement. It's a huge win for the team, but at the same time, we're facing a persistent challenge. Our industry focused business apps haven't yet found product market [00:02:00] fit. We are at a crossroads. Should we double down and find those first few customers? Or should we stop investing in building our own Apps altogether? 
I'm not a scholar of strategic planning. I've run a lot of businesses, but I've never done an MBA or studied strategy in a formal way. And to be honest, strategic planning always sounded like an academic exercise to me. Something theoretical rather than practical that I can use.
But I could sense my co-founders growing skeptical about our current approach. Especially given the lack of sales traction. I knew we needed a new plan and I wanted them to be part of shaping it. 
So I started researching different strategy frameworks. I listened to audio books like Blue Ocean Strategy, scaling Up and Seven Powers, but it was Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy that really struck a chord with me.
His approach felt grounded and [00:03:00] clear and actionable, exactly the kind of thing that we needed. One of the things I appreciated most about Rumelt's book is how clearly he defines bad strategy. 
He says a bad strategy is one that lacks any kind of diagnosis and fails to identify the core challenge facing the business. It's not just a list of goals or aspirations. It's not a vision statement or a set of corporate values, and it's not a fill in the blanks kind of template, and I find plenty of those online. And it's not a buzzword salad That sounds impressive, but actually says nothing. Honestly, a lot of the strategies I've been handed in the past by my bosses fell into those kind of traps. They were vague, disconnected, and they didn't help me make better decisions. Rumelt's framework helped me see that clearly and give me a practical way to avoid those kinds of pitfalls. 
To kick things off, our co-founders came together [00:04:00] for a half day strategy session, what Rumble calls a Strategy Foundry.
I shared a few key ideas from the Good Strategy/Bad Strategy book that had really stuck with me. A good strategy starts with a clear diagnosis of the core challenge. It then defines a guiding policy to address that challenge. And finally, it lays out a set of coherent actions to implement the policy.
Sounds simple, right? 
I also emphasized that strategy is a hypothesis. It's not a not a certainty. You can't know that a strategy is going to work. That idea really resonated with me and my co-founders because we all come from agile software development backgrounds. The parallels with empiricism, innovative learning made rumble's approach feel more familiar and practical to us.
To help make the concept of a guiding policy more tangible. I shared one of Rumelt's examples with my co-founders. It's about a local grocery store owner who was [00:05:00] struggling to maintain profits. Her diagnosis was clear she couldn't compete with the larger supermarkets based on price or hours or variety.
So she developed a guiding policy to serve busy local professionals with premium products. Her coherent actions included: cutting the hours that the store is open to focus on peak times that her customers needed her; sourcing fresh meals from artisanal suppliers not available in the big box supermarkets; training her staff to deliver exceptional customer service; launching a loyalty program for her repeat customers; and discontinuing products aimed at other segments like cost conscious students. No more ramen noodles. I, I guess. 
This example helped us see how a guiding policy can focus our efforts and make trade-offs more explicit. It's not about trying to do everything. It's not about trying to do a long list of things. It's trying to do the right things for the right reason.[00:06:00] 
Our first task then was to identify and diagnose our biggest challenge. We give ourselves 15 minutes of individual reflection time to jot down the key challenges we each saw facing the business. Then we came together, wrote our ideas on the whiteboard, described them out loud and asked each other a few clarifying questions.
In total, we surfaced probably 25 distinct challenges, and from there we grouped them down into eight themes. And then we used do voting to determine which challenge was most critical, which one challenge was most critical. That process helped us move from a broad set of concerns down to a focused diagnosis, and it gave everyone a voice in shaping the strategy.
The way that we ran the session was inspired by Design Thinking. We started with individual reflection so that everybody's ideas were captured without the loudest voices dominating the conversation. Then we came together to share and to [00:07:00] clarify. Dot voting helped us prioritize as a group. Even if someone's idea wasn't selected, they still had a say in the process. And that sense of inclusion and, and shared ownership was key to getting alignment around the strategy. It's not just my plan, it's our plan. 
One of the most surprising things that came outta our strategy session was hearing that a couple of my co-founders were feeling anxious about our industry focus.
We've been targeting a couple of key industry segments, and it's fair to say we haven't seen the results that we hoped for. Their concern was, have we chosen the wrong segments? My perspective is different. I felt like we hadn't invested in a marketing approach that had resonated with those segments, and that difference in viewpoint was important to surface.
Throughout the Strategy Foundry session, it reminded me that strategy isn't just about the market. It's also about our mindset and confidence within the team. Although we'd want a significant new project in the second half [00:08:00] of financial year 25, we agreed that our biggest challenge for the first half of financial year 26 is finding several new customers in our chosen industry segments.
If we succeed, it'll validate our product market fit for industry apps. If we don't, it's a clear signal. It's time to pivot. That clarity gave us a focused hypothesis to test and a way to measure whether our strategy is working. 
It's not about chasing every opportunity. It's about committing to a direction and learning quickly to support our guiding policy, finding three early customers for one of our apps, we've agreed on a marketing budget and engaged a new agency to help us develop and execute a focused plan. We anticipate this will generate several new sales opportunities between July and December. Alongside that, we've committed to other coherent actions that all align to that strategy. 
Now, we're not just talking about a strategy, but we're living it. We're acting on it. [00:09:00] We have a clear guiding policy, a good diagnosis, and a set of coherent actions, and we're treating it like a hypothesis to test, not a guarantee that we're gonna have to defend.
One thing I find that Rumelt uh, doesn't prescribe is a specific timeframe for your strategy. For us, a six month horizon felt right. It's long enough to make, uh, you know, strategic investments and see the results, and measure the results of our actions. But it's not so long that it's just a big, hairy, audacious goal that's five or 10 years away.
A six month timeframe keeps us focused, accountable, and adaptable. Gives us room to experiment, to learn and adjust without drifting too far away from our strategic goal. 
If you're leading a Microsoft partner practice and wrestling with strategy, I highly recommend Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. It's helped us cut through the noise, focus on what matters, align our team around a clear path forward.[00:10:00] 
I am discovering that strategy doesn't have to be academic. It can be practical, collaborative, and even energizing, especially when you treat it as a living hypothesis and not a fixed plan. 
But I'd love to hear from you. What's your favorite strategy book, or planning approach? Drop uh, me a comment in the YouTube episode or join in the conversation on the Practice Leading page on LinkedIn, and let's learn from each other.
I hope you enjoyed this Practice Leading episode and find my little story, uh, insightful and useful. 
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Until next time, keep experimenting.