Many potential successors complain that their parents do everything in the business and don't let them make any important decisions. The parents fail to teach them how the business really satisfies customers or how the business really runs efficiently at the lowest possible cost and the fastest possible speed. They also might fail to teach successor how to observe customers to find out what new things customers might need, which is what will keep the next phenomenon from happening.

Good Ideas don't last forever. Substitutes and improvements come along to replace what you do, do it better or do it at a lower cost. Competitors jump in and make it more difficult to make a profit. Customers and market segments can diminish or fail, taking your results with them.

If you're not as successful as you would like, there are many excuses you can use. You can blame it on inability to get good help, the economy, on competitors that cut prices, or inability to get capital. You can blame it on government policies. You can blame it on your associates in the business. Yes, you can blame it on all or any of these things. But where does this get you?

Whether you're making a lot of money or not, you could be missing the opportunity to add more real value to customers. You could be missing the opportunity to prune unprofitable parts of your business away and replace them with true value-adding products and services for customers that add profit to the business. You could be missing the opportunity to develop laser sharp focus on the best value strategy that would be exactly what customers really need. That discovery would lead to another key benefit: focusing on benefits you should be providing to customers sheds light on product features, service features or business processes that are inefficient or add no value for customers and hence are unnecessary. This reduces labor costs, materials costs and reduces assets required to run the business. You wouldn't bring a rifle to a fishing trip; you would bring a fishing rod. If you know what your Game is, the methods to land it become more evident.

A good strategy focuses an individual or organization on providing a unique value to a target market in order to create a competitive advantage that will last.  

A good strategy also focuses an individual or an organization on doing things that create desired results for the customer and the organization to the exclusion of other things that do not produce the desired results.

Hence, you have to decide what you won't do as well, so you will avoid pouring energy, time and money into things that don't take you where you want to go.

For example, In the fiercely competitive airline industry, Southwest Airlines saw a market opportunity to provide low cost air fares that would attract discount seekers from other airlines, plus bus and railway travelers. They would do this while generating higher customer satisfaction with better on time performance and overall convenience in the customer experience. Notice the use of the word Freedom in their past marketing. The What they endeavored to provide customers was low cost fares with high convenience and on time performance. They would not compete with the majors for mainstream business.

Of course, Southwest wouldn't make any money unless they had an operations strategy that provided their service at the lowest cost possible. They reasoned that they had expensive assets (airplanes) that needed to be earning revenue as many minutes of the day as possible. Choosing uncongested point-to-point routes to middle sized cities was the best way to keep planes in the air earning revenue as opposed to hovering to land or waiting to take off. Eliminating preferred seating sped up boarding and getting in the air. 100% online ticketing cut out cost of making sales. Allowing employee ownership created motivated, productive employees.

The combination of these things also led to higher customer satisfaction from better on-time performance. The result? Return on Sales of greater than 7% for the last five years while the rest of the industry struggled below break-even.

Southwest wanted to produce low cost fares with high convenience and on time performance. How? Uncongested point-to-point routes in middle sized cities. Direct online ticketing. Faster boarding. (Notice they stayed away from preferred seating as part of their rewards program). Fewer high cost in flight frills. Standardized airplanes to minimize time to service and maintenance airplanes. Southwest didn't fall in love with hub and spoke operations like a lot of other airlines did. They decided that was in the don't do column, happy with the market share they could get doing what they did. Besides, it made money. The other strategy no longer did. If you get too greedy and try to get it all, you become unfocused, less powerful with your core strategy, less productive and less profitable.

The best place to discover strategy is in the hearts and minds of customers and potential customers. Find what unique value you can bring to them by finding out what they need to accomplish in their business.  Many managers attempt to do this by talking to each other in meetings or surveying customers over the phone, through the mail or online. They might even bring customers to a customer council. These don't achieve the purpose. They don't get deep enough into what the customer actually does and how your product or service helps or hinders.

So what works? Go to your customers where he lives. Observe what customers do first-hand. Gain understanding of customer processes and develop keen understanding of their economics. Find out what your customer does for their customers, how do they do it and how they can make more money doing it. Your job is to discover your customer's What and How.  Miraculously, when you do that, you discover what your What and How can be. That will be the foundation of your unique value, and allow you to change right along with your customer when his or her needs change.

Strategy is successful to the extent that the individual or organization stays focused on this unique value, (the WHAT) by dedicating human, technological and capital resources exclusively on doing things that create the desired results for the target market and financial returns for the organization. That leads to the next point.

A strategy is only as effective as its weakest link. Many organizations make the mistake of overlooking weak parts of the strategy including weak organizational components or weak functional managers. Managers want to be congratulated for taking care of one necessary element of strategy and think they are making progress when they are wasting money without bringing the other elements along. Every quarterback needs receivers and a line to block for him. Balance is the key to victory, and you need to achieve a minimum competence with each element of the team to achieve balance, or you are wasting money, time and effort on the part of the strategy you improved.

For example, some think they can be successful with a great customer-satisfying value strategy while neglecting operations productivity. In this case they may attract more business temporarily but stress the organization. This results in insufficient profits to sustain and grow the organization, or neglects something as simple as inability to fulfill orders promptly. This won't prevail over the long run.

Others develop outstanding value, but fail to communicate it clearly, or fail to reach the target market with enough frequency because they don't do enough marketing or don't plan to invest in it.

Others develop the value strategy, but stray from it quickly when it doesn't produce the desired revenues immediately. Still others are drawn to suppliers, allies, employees and even customers that appear like opportunities, but in fact do not fit the strategy and steer the organization off course. This usually happens when you do not have a clear focus so you really don't know if you are straying off course.

Answer these questions well and your business will be successful if you follow through and stay focused on executing the answers.

A company must focus all resources and energy on executing the answers to these questions, starting with the value strategy, the What.

You also need to refrain from pursuing growth opportunities, operational strategies, technologies, allies, employees and suppliers that do not support that strategy.

By focusing out how your customer's business works, you discover your focus, too. How to pull it off becomes much more clear when you are aware of where your target is.

WHAT is the essence of strategy. And that's not a question.