What makes a good strategy? According to Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and author of The Design of Business, it is two fundamental, reinforcing choices: where and on what basis you will compete.

In “Why Most CEOs Are Bad at Strategy” (Harvard Business Review, January 6, 2010), Martin argues that most executives and strategy consultants are good at strategic analysis but not at strategy, which requires creative insight. “Strategy is a creative act,” he writes, “and the way to produce good strategy is to go beyond basic analysis to creatively integrate your choices concerning where you play and how you propose to win.”

The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions to guide your strategic choices including:

• How do you identify potential blind spots in your planning?
• How do you address long-term sustainability?
• How do you determine your strategic challenges and advantages and your core competencies?
• How do your strategic objectives address them?
• How do your strategic objectives address your opportunities for innovation?

The focus of the Criteria leans more toward analysis than creative insight. That’s not to say that Baldrige Award recipients haven’t excelled at figuring out where to play and how to win, but integrating these choices creatively to plan the most promising course of action is not something the Criteria specifically request. The Customer Focus category comes close with questions about how you identify current and future customer groups and markets, how you determine which customer groups and markets to pursue, how you identify and anticipate key customer requirements and expectations, and how you use this information to improve marketing and identify opportunities for innovation.

Still, as Martin suggests, it’s important to focus all of these strategic and customer processes on where you play and how you propose to win, or how you propose to excel if your organization is a school, nonprofit, or government agency. That’s a leadership development and strategic planning issue. “A good strategy is the product of the creative combination of two disparate logics rather than a single linear analytical logic flow,” writes Martin, “but CEOs and ‘strategists’ are seldom conditioned to become skilled at the requisite creative combination.”

To read more about strategic planning, click on the following articles:

• Anticipating Disruptive Change
• What Are Your Critical Success Factors?
• Identifying Capabilities Your Organization Needs
• Know Thyself—and Act Accordingly

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