Personal business strategy

Business strategies and tactics aren’t real strategies and tactics. They’re metaphorical strategies and tactics.

The terms “strategy” and “tactics” belong to military planners, who use them to decide on the actions … broad and specific, respectively … their forces pursue to defeat an enemy.

Many businesses pursue what they call strategies and employ what they’re pleased to call tactics when their intentions are quite different. Some either maneuver the company so as to avoid competing with … well, anyone. Another group have no interest in running a business at all. Their entire goal is for someone with cash to buy them — their actual products are shares of stock, not products to sell to customers.

Then there’s a third group, which ignores the entire idea of competition as irrelevant. “We’ll focus on what we do,” goes this line of thought. “Other companies can do the same. We won’t worry about them, though. If we focus on what we do and do it well, we’ll do fine.”

Not me. I do everything I possibly can to differentiate IT Catalysts from its competitors so we’ll be the ones to win your business. That’s “win” as in “choose us instead of anyone else you might be considering within the domain of what we do.”

Business is a zero-sum game. Not in the long term, perhaps, where it is both possible and desirable to increase the total amount of wealth in the macroeconomic system.

But in the short term there’s a finite amount of money to spend, and anything you spend with another company is money you don’t spend with us.

This brings us to last week’s column, which recommended you think of yourself as a business named you, choosing strategies and tactics that will help you win the game you’re forced to play. That’s the game in which the majority of employers think of employees as interchangeable sacks o’ skills and providers of effort.

The question is how. If you think I have the answer, you’re sadly mistaken. There is no the answer.

An answer? Sure thing. Here’s a thought process that might help you find yours, so long as you’re comfortable knowing you’re competing with other job seekers, and that for you to get a particular job, they’ll all have to not get that job. It’s a win/lose proposition. Your goal has to be to win. Otherwise, don’t bother to play.

Start by choosing your core strategic theme. It’s the heart of how you’re going to present yourself to the employment marketplace. Of the 18 strategic themes we’ve identified as ways companies organize their effort^*, five are likely choices for you. They are (translated into looking-for-employment terms):

• Service — what you do that will provide value for an employer.

• Customer class — the type of company you understand best and know best how to help, for example, “mid-size manufacturer” or “national retailer.”

• Marketplace — the marketplace you understand best. While similar to the customer class strategy, in a marketplace strategy you’d consider both vendor and customer organizations in an industry, rather than just one or the other.

• Price — you do what lots of other people do, but you do it for less.

• Knowledge — you know a lot about an important subject. While similar to a service strategy, here you’re selling on the value of your advice or the decisions you’ll make, not on your work products.

Which theme you choose, and within which domain, depends on your knowing, with confidence, what will put you in the top ten percent of your field.

Because no matter how tight the job market, there’s always work for at least one out of every ten people in any useful area of endeavor.

Many business executives, faced with a list like this, aren’t willing to make a choice and figure they’ll be more successful if they do ’em all. Opinion: This is a mistake.

They’re right that they can’t ignore any of them. That’s a different matter.

You most certainly do have to understand yourself in all of these terms. If, for example, you choose a service strategy (you’re a .Net developer) you must pay attention to little niceties like, for example, the minimum compensation you’re willing to accept, the knowledge you’ll need to be successful, and what sorts of companies you’re most likely to enjoy working in.

Those decisions come later. Right now you’re figuring out the answer to the most important question any prospective employer will ask you: