Strategy Builder: How to create and communicate more effective strategies

PART THREEREALIZATION

We have shown how strategy can be drawn to reflect unique strategic influences, options and developments – and that this has many advantages over the conventional box and line drawings found in textbooks or the screeds of numbers, text and generic infographics that have become the norm in conventional business practice. As you followed Part Two of this book, we hope you developed a taste for enhancing your building of strategy through pictures. While learning to draw strategy by utilizing classic frames that have stood the test of time is extremely beneficial, there is, we believe, a further advanced level of drawing strategy – that is, the development of unique and individualized, but easy-to-communicate and recall, images that outline a particular organization's strategy or some dimension of this.

We call this approach ‘stratography'. It is not a new word. It has a variety of definitions, ‘things belonging to an army', or the ‘art of directing an army', but the term is now hardly ever used. We use it here in relation to the second sense listed in the previous sentence, but also as it is reflective of the first known use of the word strategy: the Ancient Greeks created the position of ‘strategos' (a combination of stratos (= army) and agin (= to lead) – run together the combined word means to lead an army as it spreads out across the ground). This was a new leadership position created around 500 BC in the fledgling democracy of Athens. Ten ‘strategoi', ...