A Strategic Planning Tool For Strategic Pillars & Other Strategic Planning Concepts

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. 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 our ‘why.’ What is you purpose? Why does our organization exist? Once we have a clear understanding of you ‘why,’ you can start to identify the strategic pillars that will lead you towards it.

Next, you need to understand your customers deeply. What are their needs? How can you serve them better than anyone else? 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 you resources. 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.

What happens when we identify your strategic pillars and focus your resources via frameworks like OKR?

You build organizations that is focused, competitive, and customer-centric. You create a culture of clarity, where everyone understands the organization’s direction and their role in it. You foster a spirit of collaboration, as you all work towards a shared vision. And most importantly, you move closer to fulfilling our purpose – our ‘why.’

Finding your strategic pillars and focusing your resources, it’s a necessity. It’s the work you must do to serve your customers better than your competitors and move towards you vision. Embrace this work and create an organization that truly make a difference.

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 and strategic objectives. They are also often called ‘Battlegrounds’. 

Strategic themes or pillars are the broad areas of focus that underpin your overall business strategy. They represent the key priorities for your organization 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 “customer experience,” then all initiatives related to improving customer satisfaction would fall under this pillar. This could include things like implementing new technology solutions, training staff members on best practices for interacting with customers, or conducting surveys to gather feedback from customers about their experiences with your brand.

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 in time. This helps ensure alignment across teams so that everyone is working towards common objectives rather than pursuing individual agendas.

Put simply, Strategic Pillars are the building blocks upon which your strategy is built, helping to guide decision-making and resource allocation across the business.

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.

Strategic Pillar Recap

Think of Strategic Pillars as the three of four areas of focus your business has decided to focus on as a results 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 people, productivity and resources in the company on the areas that will help the company maximize growth by serving you target customers better than the competition.

You should see Strategic Pillars are an opportunity to clearly articulate your strategy to your teams so that they might create OKRs that support and align with them – more that that it a moment.

Execution is the achilles heel of Strategy

Simply having a strategy is not enough; you need to be able to execute that strategy effectively if you want your business to succeed.

One way of doing this is by using strategic themes or pillars together with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). In this article, we’ll explore what these terms mean and how they can help you achieve your goals.

Research by Kaplan and Norton found that only 10% of organizations successfully execute their strategies. Organizations should align their strategies with objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives, which in turn can improve execution and overall performance. 

10 Easy To Follow Strategy Workshop Steps

Introduction and Context Setting:

• Briefly explain the purpose and objectives of the workshop.
• Provide an overview of the current market landscape, competitive dynamics, and industry trends.
• Discuss the importance of strategy in achieving a sustainable competitive advantage.

Analysing Internal Capabilities

• Engage the leadership team in a discussion about the company’s unique strengths, core competencies, and resources.
• Identify any areas of competitive advantage or distinctive capabilities that set the company apart.
• Consider the team’s perspective on how the company can leverage these internal strengths to create value for customers.

Assessing External Opportunities and Threats

• Encourage the team to explore the external environment, including market trends, customer needs, and emerging opportunities.
• Conduct a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify potential areas of growth and challenges.
• Discuss how the company can align its offerings and value proposition with the identified market opportunities.

Defining Strategic Priorities

• Facilitate a discussion on the team’s vision for the company’s future and its long-term goals.
• Ask the team to prioritize strategic areas that align with the company’s strengths and market opportunities – Strategic Pillars.
• Encourage the team to consider trade-offs and make choices regarding where to focus resources and efforts.

Crafting a Value Proposition

• Help the team articulate a clear and compelling value proposition that resonates with customers and differentiates the company from competitors.
• Guide the team in identifying the unique benefits, features, and experiences that the company can deliver to its target customers.

Formulating Actionable Strategies

• Facilitate the development of specific strategies and initiatives to achieve the defined strategic priorities.
• Encourage the team to think creatively and explore innovative approaches.
• Discuss potential risks and challenges associated with each strategy and explore mitigation plans.
• ZOKRI guides and platform the outcomes from these conversations.

Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Metrics

• Work with the team to define measurable objectives and key results that align with the strategic priorities.
• Identify appropriate KPIs and metrics to track progress and evaluate the success of the strategies.
• Discuss how the team can implement a system for ongoing monitoring, measurement, and adjustment based on performance data
• ZOKRI will platform this for you.

Alignment and Execution

• Emphasize the importance of aligning the entire organization around the strategic priorities.
• Discuss ways to communicate and cascade the strategy throughout the company.
• Agree the values and behaviours that need to be lived in order to ensure that your vision, strategy and goals are going to be achieved.
• Explore methods for fostering accountability, collaboration, and a culture of strategic execution
• All of this is done in ZOKRI

Continuous Learning and Adaptation

• Highlight the need for ongoing learning, feedback loops, and adaptation in today’s dynamic business environment.
• Encourage the team to develop mechanisms for collecting feedback, learning from failures, and making strategic adjustments as necessary – this is automatically done in ZOKRI.

Wrap-up and Next Steps

• Summarize the key outcomes and action items from the workshop.
• Discuss next steps for further refining and communicating the strategy.
• Offer ongoing support and guidance as needed.