Understanding your current business is the starting point for improving the direction of your business. You have to know where you are now in order to determine how you can improve it. You will start to see not only what you do well for your desired customers, but also why your desired customers should probably choose another alternative for a variety of reasons. You will see what makes you unique, but you will also see what you do that is not unique at all and where other options are really better than yours. The more you dig into answering these questions, the more you will see what you want to keep the same and what you will have to change in order to provide something that is uniquely valuable to your desired customers that will cause them to stay with you or come to you.

Replacing “Vision, Strategy and Tactics” with “Understanding, Direction, and Actions” In this paper, I am going to avoid using the word strategy.

It is tough to use a word when it has so many different meanings. Over the past 20 years, I have read dozens of books and articles on strategy and have had dozens of conversations with senior executives in many different businesses and industries, from small businesses to medium-sized businesses to Fortune 100 companies, about strategy.

Here is the odd thing. These conversations had very, very little in common. As far as I can remember I have never heard two people define strategy the same way or use the same approach to developing their strategy or use their strategy in exactly the same way in making decisions.

Effective Executive Magazine, Determine the Direction and Purposeful Actions, Desired customers, Vision, Strategy and Tactics