"We Want to Be the Best"

Groundbreaking.

Truly.

Nobody Has Thought of That Before.

Somewhere in your organisation's strategy document, there is a sentence that describes what your organisation aspires to be. 

Something like: "To be the world's most trusted partner in delivering innovative, sustainable solutions that create meaningful impact for our customers, our people, and society at large." 

Nobody wrote that at gunpoint.

Someone wrote it proudly, in a workshop, with a marker pen, and the room nodded.

It is also compatible with bankruptcy.

Aspirations are like that — they survive everything except the actual market.

The aspiration is the first sentence of the strategy.

Not the whole strategy.

After it comes the harder work — the specific choices about where you will compete and how you will win there.

As a manager, your job is to push past the aspiration and demand the logic.

Ask what it means for which customers you will serve and which you will not.

Ask what it means for where you will invest and where you will stop.

Ask what it means for the decision your team will face on Tuesday afternoon when two priorities conflict.

If the aspiration cannot answer those questions — and it cannot, because aspirations never can — keep going until you find something that can.

That something is the strategy.