Growing the Top Line

CHAPTER 13Select Strategies: Step 5: Plan the Battle on Each Route

The selection of a subset of the 16 Growth Pathways that we generated in Step 4 now will drive the creation of the actual strategies and tactics to be employed by the team.

There are many books written about strategy, and what it is and isn’t. Strategy answers the question “how” we will achieve our goals. Tactics are the “means” we will use, the measurable “who does what, where, and when” that makes the strategy real. So growth strategies (which are what this book is about) are clean statements about how the company will grow, and growth tactics are specific actions to achieve growth.

James Klein of Qorvo has a great perspective on growth strategy:

Strategy is not what you are doing for the rest of the year. A strategy is what you want to be. What do you want to do in 3 to 5 years? Often, one of the first things I like to do, and you know this because we did it with you, is to try to establish a goal and it ought to be a scary goal. When we formed the company, we said we want to double the business in 4 years, and if you do that math you go, that’s crazy, right? And we failed…It took us 5 years.

Having that aggressive goal out there to try to understand where you want to go, I think it’s really important, so you know to the new practitioner, figure out what you want to be, put a goal out there, and have a strategy ...