Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) don't have it easy.

 

Unlike in large corporations, where strategic and operational responsibilities tend to be quite separate activities, in SMBs they tend to sit with the same people.  And those people will most likely gravitate to immediate operational issues over strategy, given two conditions:  the pressing needs of the enterprise, and the more immediate gratification of earlier results being visible.  In other words, their data is real time, but their ability to strategically process and act on it is not.  The smaller the organisation, the closer strategic decision makers are to operational inputs, but the less they are able to process and act on those inputs.

 

The mix of available strategy inputs changes with organization size: the smaller the organisation, the closer strategic decision makers are to operational inputs.  The bigger the organization, the more formally the gap between strategy and operations needs to be bridged.

 

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) tend to have a high degree of strategic and operating complexity, but without the accompanying organizational capability or complexity.  And in many cases, SMB's lack the internal organizational capabilities needed to successfully manage that complexity.  Ironically, they tend to have sufficiently large populations to require a comprehensive assess/design/execute approach which cannot normally cannot be delivered in-house without sourcing external expertise for certain specialisms.  Whether strategy formulation, marketing alignment, human performance management or project management, most SMBs don't have all the capabilities they need under one roof at any given time.

 

The big picture stuff - market trends, political, economic, social, technological and legislative change - is often more readily available but often overlooked by the strategy owner.  Decisions are made based on the easily available data, and a narrow internal perspective.

 

So here's a question:  how well do the 'owners' of strategy in your organization understand the strategic implications of their organization’s operational constraints/ requirements?

 

Big organization strategy has to deal in broad brushstrokes, as to go into detail would be unmanageable.  This means that strategy execution in big firms takes on average 3-5 years to operationalize.  Smaller organization strategy can be much more granular and precise, which can drastically reduce the time to operationalize a ‘strategic shift'.

 

Objectivity Consulting has amassed a range of experiences and mission-critical which most SMBs don’t have under their roof permanently.  We bring a number of different capabilities and solutions, only when they are required, without your business having to pay for them every day of the week or every month of the year in the form of a full-time employee.  You get the extra horsepower you need, when you need it.

 

Contact us to learn more about how we do this.