The Three Elements of Strategy: This is how you gain clarity about how you will win.

John Cousins
February 7, 2023
2 min read

There are three elements of a strategy:

• Objectives

• Scope

• Competitive Advantage

Objectives

Objectives are the goals that define success. For each objective, the strategy must also establish the metrics that will measure and define meeting the goals. The goals need to be measurable and achievable. Perfection is the ideal but is not a practical goal.

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

― Paul Kalanithi

Scope

Scope defines the boundaries of the organizations potential activities. Scope represents the strategic guardrails or riverbanks. It is the articulation of what the enterprise will and will not do.

Competitive Advantage

Competitive Advantage details why customers buy your products rather than those of competitors. It is essentially the feature set that is superior in the mind of customers to the features of your competitors.

Competitive advantage relates to the tightness of the coupling of Product/Market Fit. Your product or service must satisfy a customer need, address a customer pain point, or provide delight. Your unique value proposition provides the criteria to align the firm’s activities and places parameters on future experiments.

This is how you gain clarity about how you will win.

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John Cousins
Author, Entrepreneur, & Teacher

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