Strategic Pillars are one of the most popular strategy models used as part of an annual strategic planning process. Put simply, they are the battlegrounds your company must focus on and win. Here you will learn how to create your Strategic Pillars and operationalise their delivery, ensuring there is not a strategy and execution divide.
Written by Matt Roberts | Co-Founder of ZOKRI
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How You Are Going To Win
Channelling resources and serving customers better than your competition
Strategic pillars are about channeling your resources towards winning the battles that allow you to serve you customers better than anyone else – and ultimately move closer to your vision.
Why should you dedicate time and energy to discover you strategic pillars? Because at the heart of every inspiring organization is a clear sense of purpose – a ‘why.’ This purpose drives you, and you strategic pillars are a key part of the roadmap that guides you towards it. They represent the key areas that we must excel in to make your vision a reality.
But to identify these pillars, you need to do the necessary work – either internally or using an OKR strategy consultant. It requires a deep understanding of your purpose, your vision, your customers, and your competitive landscape. It demands that you ask challenging questions and make difficult decisions.
Once you identified these strategic pillars, you must focus your resources towards them. You must choose your battles wisely, concentrating your efforts where we can make the most significant impact. This focus allows you to serve our customers better than your competitors and move towards your vision more effectively.
How do we identify our strategic pillars and focus our resources?
You start by understanding your winning aspiration? What do you propose to be best at? Which also means that you need to understand your customers, the value that need from you. What are their needs? How can you serve them better than anyone else? What is your Value Proposition and in what segment is it going to be focused? Answering these questions will help you identify the areas where we need to focus our resources.
You also need to understand your competitive landscape. Who are your competitors? What are they good at? Where are they lacking? This understanding will help us identify where we can excel and differentiate yourself.
Finally, you need to focus your resources and address CEO challenges. This means making hard decisions. You can’t do everything, so you must choose the battles that we can win and that will make the most significant impact.
Think Of Strategic Pillars As Battlegrounds
You Must Win
Strategic pillars are the key areas of focus or priorities that an organization chooses to achieve its long-term vision. They are also often called ‘Battlegrounds’.
Strategic themes or pillars are the broad focus areas underpinning your overall business strategy. They represent your organization’s key priorities over a given period of time—typically one year—and provide guidance on where resources should be allocated.
For example, if one of your strategic pillars was “Simplicity & Value,” all initiatives related to improving your products would fall under this. This could include implementing new features, training staff members on best practices for interacting with customers, or conducting surveys to gather feedback from customers about their experiences.
By defining these overarching themes upfront as part of the planning process, everyone within the organization has clarity around what’s most important at any given moment. This helps ensure team alignment so everyone works towards common objectives rather than pursuing individual agendas.
Put simply, Strategic Pillars are the foundation of your strategy, helping to guide decision-making and resource allocation across the business.
How you decide on your pillars is a social process. Within and across teams, in the markets you want to play in, and for the customers you want to serve in those markets, you need to work out and propose ways to serve them better than your competition.
To arrive at your objectives that can be clustered and prioritized to form your pillars, you should have considered a range of challenging questions, questions like:
- Customer: What would delight your target customers, and how would you do that better than your competition?
- Advantage: How can you create and sustain a competitive advantage so competitors don’t try to enter your market?
- Capabilities: What capabilities or competencies do you need to improve or acquire?
- Issues: What is performing badly, which processes are not working properly, what are the major issues being faced that are holding you back?
- Opportunities: Which opportunities are being missed?
Do’s and don’ts to consider when defining strategic pillars
Do’s:
- Ensure alignment with your organization’s vision, mission, and values.
- Involve key stakeholders in the process.
- Make the pillars clear, concise, and actionable.
- Regularly review and update your strategic pillars based on changes in the business environment.
Don’ts:
- Avoid having too many strategic pillars, as it can dilute focus and resource allocation.
- Don’t ignore emerging trends or changes in the business environment.
- Avoid being too vague or overly ambitious in your strategic pillars.
Strategic Pillar Examples
Google’s Strategic Pillars
- Organize the world’s information.
- Make it universally accessible and useful.
- Focus on long-term innovation.
Amazon’s Strategic Pillars
- Customer obsession.
- Long-term thinking.
- Operational excellence.
Microsoft Strategic Pillars
- Create more personal computing.
- Reinvent productivity and business processes.
- Build the intelligent cloud platform.
Apple’s Strategic Pillars
- Design and innovation.
- User experience and simplicity.
- Integration of hardware, software, and services.
Tesla Strategic Pillars
- Accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
- Develop cutting-edge technology.
- Improve affordability and accessibility of electric vehicles.
Airbnb Strategic Pillars
- Create a sense of belonging.
- Drive sustainable growth.
- Foster trust and safety within the platform.
IBM Strategic Pillars
- Focus on high-value segments of the IT market.
- Leverage data and AI for business transformation.
- Deliver innovative solutions through a hybrid cloud platform.
Even the best strategy needs excellent execution. Our Fractional Chief of Staff service provides immediate, experienced support to help you:
- Transform strategic intent into operational reality
- Implement proven frameworks for execution
- Free up your time for strategic priorities
- Build organizational alignment and momentum
Unlike hiring a full-time Chief of Staff, which typically takes 6+ months, you can access battle-tested expertise and frameworks immediately. One day per week, we help you build the systems and capabilities your organization needs to execute effectively.
Strategic Pillars Live Within A Strategy & A Story
Strategic maturity happens when a business can follow a process that results in strategic choices being made. Choices are clearly articulated along with the unique differentiating value that the business intends to provide a very specific group of customers. Goals, measures and people alignment can now follow.
The hallmarks of a good strategy::
- Explains the problem/challenge.
- Customer value-focused.
- Easy to communicate and unambiguous.
- Logical, feels great and energises.
- Addresses valuable segment.
- Pinpoints unique and valuable capabilities.
- Plays to your strengths.
- Avoids your weaknesses.
- Takes advantage of trends.
- Takes you from being compared to many competitors to being compared with a few or NONE – avoiding you being a ‘me too’ organization.
- Takes you from having no real point of difference to being clearly different and better.
- There’s an obvious sequence – do the first and last.
- It can be resourced – people, money, tech etc.
- Risks are understood and are acceptable.
- The timeline for execution is acceptable.
- Meaningful metrics keep score.
- Dependencies are understood.
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Try Sharing Your Strategy As Story With Strategic Pillars
We are often engaged in helping our customers create new strategies using our tried-and-tested 12-step process. We are also asked to refine and tell the stories of existing strategies. The intended final audience for these is managers and their reports inside the company. The goal is to get them to understand and align their work with the strategy.
The problem is these strategy documents are often long, unclear, and uninspiring. Stories are more accessible for others to comprehend, recall, and align with.
As part of our strategy consulting, we work with customers to turn a detailed strategy into a story that will resonate with and influence individuals at all levels of an organization. Here’s an example that uses several storytelling techniques. How does it compare to the strategy that you share?
Strategic Story Example
This is an example of a strategy that uses a storytelling style to maximize comprehension, recall and alignment..
Acme Inc.: Revolutionizing Legal Work Through AI
Mountains of documents, intricate contracts, and ever-changing regulations threaten to bury even the most dedicated lawyers under an avalanche of paperwork.
Armed with the power of artificial intelligence and a mission to set lawyers free, we are here to help.
The Challenge: Drowning in Documents
Picture this: talented lawyers, their desks piled high with contracts, their eyes tired from endless review sessions, their weekends sacrificed at the altar of billable hours.
The pain point we are here to solve is the sheer volume and complexity of legal documents we face daily. Our role is to provide relief by being a trusted guide, a way for people to reclaim their time, do less of the mundane and unleash their true potential.
We Are The In-house Lawyers AI-Powered Legal Sidekick
Acme Inc. isn’t just another legal tech startup. We’re the Robin to every in-house lawyer’s Batman, the Samwise to their Frodo, the AI-powered sidekick that turns the tide in the battle against bureaucratic busywork.
Our mission? To liberate lawyers from the drudgery of document review, allowing them to focus on the high-value, strategic work that truly matters.
Our Winning Aspiration
Fast forward three years: Acme Inc. has become the #1 AI-powered document review solution for in-house legal teams across the United States.
We’re not just saving time; we’re transforming the very nature of legal work, enabling lawyers to become the strategic powerhouses their organizations need them to be.
The Acme Advantage: Speed, Accuracy, and Liberation
What sets us apart? It’s simple:
- Unmatched Speed: Our AI doesn’t just work fast; it works at the speed of light. On average, we’re saving lawyers 25 hours a week. That’s not just efficiency; that’s liberation.
- Pinpoint Accuracy: Our AI doesn’t just skim; it scrutinizes. It catches the details human eyes might miss, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.
- Lawyer-Centric Design: We’re not here to replace lawyers but to empower them. Our solution is built by legal minds for legal minds, ensuring seamless integration into existing workflows.
The Game Plan: Scaling Our Superpowers
To achieve our vision, we’re focusing on three strategic pillars:
- AI Enhancement: We’ll continuously refine our AI, staying ahead of the curve in natural language processing and machine learning.
- User Experience Mastery: We’ll make our platform so intuitive that even the most tech-averse lawyer will feel like a digital native.
- Market Expansion: We’ll start by dominating the in-house legal team market, then expand to law firms and government legal departments.
Measuring Success: The Acme Scorecard
We’ll track our progress with laser focus:
- Time Saved: Time saved is our north star metric. We aim to increase the average time saved per lawyer to 35 hours within 18 months.
- User Adoption: We’ll measure the percentage of lawyers in each client organization actively using our platform daily.
- Accuracy Rate: We’ll maintain a 99.9% accuracy rate in document review and markup.
- Client Expansion: We aim to double our client base year-over-year for the next three years.
The Acme Promise: A Brighter Future for Legal Work
Imagine a world where lawyers can leave the office at 5 PM, where weekends are for family, not for frantic document review. A world where legal teams become strategic assets, not cost centers. That’s the world Acme Inc. is creating, one AI-powered review at a time.
To our future clients, we say this: stick with us, and we promise to transform your legal team from document-drowners to strategic superstars. The clock is ticking on the old way of doing things. It’s time to embrace the future of legal work.
Together, we’re not just changing the legal industry. We’re liberating it.
What did you think? We’d happily work with you on your strategy and then show you how to use OKRs and metrics to execute it.
Strategic Pillar Recap
Think of Strategic Pillars as the three of four areas of focus your business has decided to focus on as a result of a strategic planning process. They are often referred to as the ‘battlegrounds you must win.
Like all forms of strategy, the role of Strategic Pillars is simple: to focus and align the company’s people, productivity, and resources on the areas that will help the company maximize growth by serving its target customers better than the competition.
You should see Strategic Pillars as an opportunity to clearly articulate your strategy to your teams so that they might create OKRs that support and align with them – more than a moment.
See what best-in-class OKRs really look like. Download our comprehensive guide featuring a detailed OKR example that’s changing how organizations think about strategy execution.
"This isn't your typical OKR template - it's a masterclass in strategic thinking"
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