Five Crucial Strategy Questions

Freek Vermeulen, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School, has published a terrific post on the HBR blog this week.  It's titled, "5 Strategy Questions Every Leader Should Make Time For."  Here are his five key questions about competitive strategy:

1.  What does not fit?

2.  What would an outsider do?

3.  Is my organization consistent with my strategy?

4.  Do I understand why we do it this way?

5.  What might be the long term consequences?

I especially liked this advice about what doesn't fit.  Vermeulen writes:

Ask yourself, of the various activities and businesses that you have moved into, do they make sense together? Individually, each of them may seem attractive, but can you explain why they would work well together; why the sum is greater than the parts? As the late Steve Jobs explained to Apple’s employees when he axed a seemingly attractive business line, “Although micro-cosmically it made sense, macro-cosmically it didn’t add up.