3 Steps to a Winning Business Strategy in the AI Age
Last week’s Mind Map Guru workshop with Suleiman Shaibu emphasized why strategic planning is critical for SMBs (small & medium businesses), with half statistically failing within 5 years. As Suleiman said, “If you don’t plan, then you’re planning to fail.”
This inspired me to share my strategic planning system in today’s article.
Why is this important?
In When Will AI Take Your Job?, Tomas Pueyo notes:
“It’s easier than ever to create a business: The cost of coding is dropping, the cost of design, analytics, hosting, content generation, marketing, sales, customer service… Anybody can spin up a business and rake in millions. This is thanks to the immense productivity gains we’ve seen in technology in the last few decades.”
In short, entrepreneurs are more empowered than ever, and the entry barrier is lower than ever for ordinary people to become entrepreneurs.
However, if everyone has access to these tools, then the competitive edge will in be how you use them.
In other words, strategic planning will play an increasingly pivotal role.
As we have seen in the previous few Guru events, the nature of Strategy involves understanding oneself, the company and the terrain as well as trade-offs and making decisions - the latin root word of which is literally “to cut off”, for we can only take one path at a time.
Ironically, Strategy itself is extremely difficult to formulate in our noisy modernity that’s overabundant in choices, tools and opportunities. Focus, which is required to execute on Strategy, becomes a scarcer resource still.
This is especially relevant for an entrepreneur like me who runs a lean 4-person team across 5 businesses, which means we leverage technology extensively for content creation, meeting summaries, process automation and brainstorming. However, it requires careful strategic planning to deploy AI in the right places*.
So let me walk you through my three-step system on how I accomplish both Strategy creation and execution so you can adapt it for your own purposes:
Step 1 - Business Process Map: I create a mind map of key business processes, showing how each department interacts as an integrated system and how it generates value for our customers. I walk every employee through this map no matter if they’ve been with me for a while or just joined yesterday. It ensures accountability by showing how each department’s output is another department’s input, therefore if they don’t deliver on time, they’ll create bottlenecks that could compromise the entire system.
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