Business strategies and
tactics aren't real strategies and tactics.
They're metaphorical strategies and tactics.
The terms "strategy" and "tactics" belong to military planners, who
use them to decide on the actions ... broad and specific, respectively
... their forces pursue to defeat an enemy.
Many businesses
pursue what they call strategies and employ what
they’re pleased to call tactics when their intentions are quite
different.
Some either
maneuver the company so as to avoid competing with ... well, anyone.
Another group have no interest in running a business at all. Their
entire goal is for someone with cash to buy them -- their actual
products are shares of stock, not products to sell to customers.
Then there's a third
group, which ignores the entire idea of
competition as irrelevant. "We'll focus on what we do," goes this line
of thought. "Other companies can do the same. We won't worry about them,
though. If we focus on what we do and do it well, we'll do fine."
Not me. I do
everything I possibly can to differentiate IT Catalysts
from its competitors so we'll be the ones to win your business. That’s "win" as in "choose us instead of anyone else you might be considering
within the domain of what we do."
Business is a
zero-sum game. Not in the long term, perhaps, where it
is both possible and desirable to increase the total amount of wealth in
the macroeconomic system.
But in the short term
there's a finite amount of money to spend, and
anything you spend with another company is money you don't spend with
us.
This brings us to last week's
column,
which recommended you think of yourself as a business named you,
choosing strategies and tactics that will help you win the game you're
forced to play. That's the game in which the majority of employers think
of employees as interchangeable sacks o' skills and providers of
effort.
The question is how.
If you think I have the answer, you're sadly
mistaken. There is no the answer.
An answer?
Sure thing. Here's a thought process that might
help you find yours, so long as you're comfortable knowing you're
competing with other job seekers, and that for you to get a particular
job, they'll all have to not get that job. It's a win/lose proposition.
Your goal has to be to win. Otherwise, don't bother to play.
Start by choosing
your core strategic theme. It's the heart of how
you're going to present yourself to the employment marketplace. Of the
18 strategic themes we’ve identified as ways companies organize their
effort*, five are likely choices for you. They are
(translated into looking-for-employment terms):
Which theme you
choose, and within which domain, depends on your
knowing, with confidence, what will put you in the top ten percent of
your field.
Because no matter how
tight the job market, there's always work for
at least one out of every ten people in any useful area of endeavor.
Many business
executives, faced with a list like this, aren't willing
to make a choice and figure they'll be more successful if they do 'em
all. Opinion: This is a mistake.
They're right that
they can't ignore any of them. That's a different
matter.
You most certainly do
have to understand yourself in all of these
terms. If, for example, you choose a service strategy (you're a .Net
developer) you must pay attention to little niceties like, for example,
the minimum compensation you’re willing to accept, the knowledge you'll
need to be successful, and what sorts of companies you're most likely to
enjoy working in.
Those decisions come
later. Right now you’re figuring out the answer
to the most important question any prospective employer will ask you:
Why they should
hire you instead of one of your competitors.
*Credit where it’s due: Our work
in developing this list began with Michel Roberts’ excellent Strategy
Pure and Simple (1993).
