Straight from the Library: Straight Browsing from the Library: Strategy Quest by Paul A. Sacco

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. Paul Sacco will be awarding a $10 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. In addition, the publisher is offering this and several other books FREE for a limited time: https://books.bookfunnel.com/businesspromo/q6gn21s5w5. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

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In Strategy Quest: The Executive Guide for Finding Business Opportunities, you will learn how to achieve the strategic mindset necessary to create and decide on the business opportunities that will put you ahead of your competition.

Using the psychology of personality type, you will understand how to make the shift to this growth mindset. In Strategy Quest, you will learn that the strategic mindset is composed of Strategic Intuition and Strategic Thinking. Strategic Intuition creates strategic visions and concepts, while strategic thinking decides if these are genuinely strategic and the right choice for your business.

Strategy Quest uses business examples to show what the strategic mindset is and isn’t. The book also equips you with the tools that you will need for your Strategy Quest and shows you how to overcome the obstacle that you might encounter.

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The strategic mindset takes the initiative. Too often, executives depend upon finding opportunities in the apparent certainty of emerging trends or through the adoption of the successful initiative of others. These defensive routes to opportunities are fraught with problems, and while they may sometimes be necessary, you must recognize that they are not strategic.

The first problem is so many businesses will be chasing the same trend or initiative that a gold-rush mentality takes hold. Fierce competition makes it difficult for all but the earliest and most strategic competitors to find the gold. Hubris might result in executives believing that their business will be one of the few to hit the mother lode, but all too often, this is just wishful thinking.

The second problem with defensive initiatives is that your business must play catch-up, and by the time it arrives, there might not very much gold left in the field. Implementing a defensive initiative might not even help a business stem the loss of ground or distance on competitors. For instance, Nokia found itself too late to adopt the smartphone opportunity.

The third reason that executives must act proactively is that following others means they are letting others determine the growth rate of their business. Even when growth results from following a business trend or the successful initiative of another business, it was an external party that facilitated the growth. Executives are not doing their job if their growth rate is limited to the rate at which competitors come up with opportunities or business trends emerge.

The fourth reason for proactivity is that, unless you are proactive, your business can never gain ground or distance on others. Executives may claim that they can’t predict what customers will want; however, they are missing the point. Strategic opportunities are not demand-driven; they are supply-driven. Customers will spend more money at a business that proactively differentiates itself by better fulfilling their needs.

Steve Jobs once said, “The customer doesn’t know what they want until you show it to them.” In the book, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, Roger Martin and A.G Lafley note that a core strategic capability at Proctor and Gamble (P&G) is an understanding of the “unarticulated needs of consumers” so that they can “see opportunities before they [have become] obvious to others” (11).

After finding a strategic opportunity, executives must continually and proactively find new ones. This perspective contrasts with the widely held opinion that strategy is relatively fixed. For example, the website of one strategy consultant notes that “One of the characteristics of strategy is that it doesn’t change much over time.” In contrast, Independent Corporate Advisor, Ken Favaro wrote that “Successful strategists know that strategy must be adaptable, dynamic, and flexible. This is because every strategy is a bet on a perceived future and each day brings new learning and information about how your future might unfold.”

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