How does strategy enhance your business?

If you have ever felt unlucky, or experienced failure, I’m guessing you would still prefer to try something else than ask for help. Admitting to ourselves that we aren’t up to the task happens naturally and presents opportunity. It’s in those moments that control is in your head, and presenting choices. It’s where having a strategy, a young man told me, “creates an edge for future success.”

People regardless of their age or physical health find it impossible to still their thoughts as well as their body. In English, we say people are busy going about their business.

It’s an odd expression when you think about it What business are they doing? Unconsciously, I believe their busy ness keeps them alive–our physical systems are busy processing something—whether it’s breathing, moving, eating, sleeping, digesting and/ or eliminating. Survival is the strategy, even if it’s not conscious.

In Business, survival is also an unconscious strategy, and expansion or growth the conscious description. On a personal level, we are wired for survival. Great businesses build their organizations and support systems consciously by using their edge (or strategy) to align and evaluate the success of their activities and efforts.

If you are among the lucky, your business has more than a plan it has a strategy. What’s the difference? Plans are outputs, while strategy is an active practice, a sign of disciplined thinking at work.

A Business plan merely puts thoughts to paper (or a digital equivalent). The plan isn’t your strategy but evidence that supports your choices, informs your actions. Customers don’t care if you have a plan or a strategy they care whether your business delivers the quality of goods or services that meets their expectations given the price they pay.

Ever play or watch a sport? Think about the relationship of time spent in practice to the quality or caliber of play. A plan to practice differs from assuming the position. What keeps you going, keeps you practicing until your play becomes instinctual self-guided? That’s where having an edge in mind, a strategy keeps guiding your effort, allows you to test slight variations in your movements, coordination, focus, effort and drive.

Strategy is the edge that creates future success. Style and responsiveness differentiate amateur play from professional, they also mark a strategy.

n the heat of play, your best laid plans may go unrealized, but set of moves well-practiced that result from creating a strategy will affect the outcome.