What Is Your Strategy? How to Put Your Strategic Thinking onto a Single Strategy Poster

This booklet builds upon and extends our previous work on business strategy, which we published in April 2020 in the Harvard Business Review (HBR.org). While the general ideas remain the same, certain aspects have changed from the original article. For instance, we have realized that strategic decisions regarding “position” are best served by explicitly considering three subdimensions, namely purpose, place, and performance. Likewise, in this booklet, we have reduced our focus on crisis management – the predominant context of our original article. Instead, we aim to provide a general guide for strategy development – applicable regardless of the situation at hand.

HOW TO USE THE STRATEGY POSTER

With this booklet, we wish to provide a short but comprehensive guide to defining, discussing, and developing an organization’s strategy – which can be placed on a strategy poster. The dictionary definition of “poster” is as follows:

1: a usually large, printed sheet that often contains pictures and is posted in a public place (as to promote something)

2: a person who posts something online

Both aspects are relevant for our work. We believe that the outcome of strategic discussions should be clear enough to be placed on a poster for promoting the strategy – and that strategists should increasingly act as ‘posters’, i.e., communicators of the newly developed strategy. We hope that this booklet and the application of our Strategy Poster help
improve strategy discussions, strategy alignment, and strategy
implementation.

The booklet is a part of the research activities underlying the servitize.dk (https://servitize.dk/) project supported by the Danish Industry Foundation.