What is strategy?

I’m gearing up to teach a class on strategy for the Master of Professional Studies in Public Relations and Corporate Communication program at Georgetown University. This will be the second semester I’m teaching it.

I start the first class with a question: what is strategy? The consensus answer is generally something like, “a road map.” I suspect that would be the consensus answer in most rooms.

I’ll posit here what I argue to the class: a plan is a roadmap, the turn-by-turn directions to get from point A to point B. Strategy is bigger than that; strategy determines what the roadmap will look like. To beat the metaphor to death, will the map include highways or sidestreets? Will it include stops along the way, or take you straight through? Without a strategy, the answers are haphazard.

Through the course of the semester, I will work with my students through a series of exercises to demonstrate that strategy is the set of guiding principles against which planning and implementation decisions should be made. Strategy takes into account the context – internal and external, micro and macro – to shed a directional light on decision-making so planning and implementation can be deliberate, transparent, and effective.

Are you convinced? Disagree? What does “strategy” mean to you?

This semester, we’ll work through four models of strategic thinking: step-by-step, scenario, games, and values-based. I’ll blog about the experience along the way, and look forward to hearing what you think.

The Dean of the program, the inimitable Denise Keyes, describes the class as the one where we teach students how to think.

That’s overstating the case, of course: the students in the program are uniformly impressive, and already know how to think. But, even super smart people with loads of experience need help learning how to think strategically. That’s my passion, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to help students and clients be strategic.

-Shayna