It is often seen as the secret of long-term success and one of the hallmarks of leadership. It unites people, develops opportunities and, crucially in these difficult times, ensures survival. But what exactly is strategy? How does it differ from "vision" and "tactics"? And how can you tell a good strategic plan from a bad one? To find out, Director asked five experts from different backgrounds to explain their approach

The consultant

For Cognosis managing partner Richard Brown, strategy is all about developing a plan for growth. "We help businesses find new ways of growing or growing faster," he says.

Brown and his team work in large international companies, such as Coca-Cola, where senior executives usually have a clear idea of what strategy means. "There is no magic involved," Brown says. "Our definition of a strategy is that it is a statement of where a business is headed in the long term. It should include major goals and milestones, as well as how resources and assets are going to be deployed."

For Brown, a strategy means nothing unless it is fully communicated throughout the organisation. It should never be kept to the people who devised it. "It is sad when you see the top team working on 'their' strategy. They don't think about how to engage with other people and motivate them," he says.

Brown believes a good strategy has five characteristics. It is simple, clear, credible, motivating and it reflects the uniqueness of the organisation. "We work a lot in the drinks industry," explains Brown. "Strategies could end up looking the same. But the brands will be different and the culture of the organisations will be different."

The test of a strategy comes when times are tough. Then, says Brown, there is a temptation for business leaders to lose their way and look for opportunities to cut costs and maintain margins. "But if you are not thinking about your strategy, you are hardly thinking at all," says Brown.
He urges the companies he works with to continually health-check their strategy against a number of different scenarios. "A strategy is the story of how a business is going to grow and develop. You have to ask if that still makes sense. If 'yes', then the challenge becomes how to supply resources to areas that will drive growth," he says.

"Right now, business leaders clearly need to be scanning the environment and taking a view of where the market is headed and to fitness-check their strategy." Brown is aware that in smaller organisations strategic thinking is often regarded as an added "extra" rather than an essential to the business, but he argues that it's never too late to start.

"A recession may frustrate the timeline for achieving goals, but it won't necessarily invalidate the strategy itself," he says. In any event, there has to be a clear statement from the top. "If people get a strategy and check it is fit for recession, they have to say that to the organisation and demonstrate their commitment to it," comments Brown.
He also warns that strategies fail if plans are not developed and people are not clear what their roles and accountabilities are.

The leadership expert

Strategy, for Julia Middleton, is never set in stone. "You should not trust a company that has a strategy for the next 20 years," she says. "Be clear what your goal is, but you must have flexibility and be brave enough to recalibrate instantly." When times are tough, Middleton believes leaders must have the confidence to be flexible. "Out of chaos comes huge opportunities," she says.

Since she founded Common Purpose in 1988 to develop the skills of leaders, Middleton has worked with hundreds of executives to help them and, in turn, their companies. She has a keen eye on the current economic climate and says such testing times are proof that you have to be prepared to adapt.

"You need a strategy that can alter when change comes and when other features or angles come in," she says. "It means you can accelerate out of recession."

Middleton is clear that companies that fail are those that don't embrace new ideas. "If you are not broad in your thinking you don't see opportunities-or what the problems are," she says.

For Middleton, strategy is defined as a chosen direction. "It is often not the only one," she points out. "But it is a direction and a focus, and a way of getting there. It is something that everyone in the organisation can see and understand."

But changing circumstances may mean a changing path. Fixed ideas can often be the leader's enemy. "If you tie things down too tightly you might end up with a Soviet plan and no ability to weave or duck."

Middleton often sees leaders who are so weighed down by a strategy document that they're afraid to put it into action. "Real strategies are not documents," she points out. "Sometimes, you might have to face up to the fact [that] this is a dying business. But you can still have a strategy and lead people properly to something that might have a limited life."

When times become tougher, Middleton says everyone responds in different ways. But her best advice is to review strategy to see whether it is sensible, and then be prepared to go with it more flexibly. "You should be working on strategy all the time," she says. "If you go outside your world you will find lots of threats and lots of things changing. But there will also be lots of opportunities and you will change your mindset."

The military man

Military strategy is all about clarity. "If it is not simple, it is not understood, and if it is not understood it won't get done," says Chris Hart, UK partner at business performance consultancy McKinney Rogers and one-time soldier. For the past two years, Hart has been applying what he learned when he served in the British Army to help businesses from all sectors nail down their own strategies.

Hart, who joined McKinney Rogers after a six-year stint in the City, says that in business the word strategy is often poorly and inconsistently defined. "There are people who understand strategy because they have been formulating it," he says. "Then there are the people who don't get strategy communicated down to them. And there is usually a group of people who think they understand what strategy is but have a mix of vision and tactics as well, with strategy thrown in."

Some 80 per cent of McKinney Rogers' partners are ex-military, and the firm is often approached by companies whose strategies lack clarity and are therefore difficult to follow. Hart asks: "How can you execute a strategy if you don't know what you need, and can't align everyone in the same direction?"

But can you really compare the lessons of military command—where both objectives and orders tend to be simple and clear—to business life? Hart thinks you can: "In the military, taking one hill might be just one mission in the overall strategy. Plus it [the battle] is multi-dimensional: we are now fighting terrorists, who are the unseen enemy. That's not dissimilar to the complexity in most organisations."

The military metaphor can also be used for the current economic turmoil. "When a fog of war descends [a recession] and you have an ambiguous environment, you have to find a path through," explains Hart. "Once you have that pathway you have to line people up behind you. With the right behaviour, if you take the wrong path you can change path."

For Hart, the role of a leader is crucial in putting strategy into practice. "Someone has to sit there and say 'where do we want to get to and how are we going to get there?' A lot of organisations struggle because they get bogged down in tactics. But the leader should have a helicopter view."

With a "helicopter view", the leader will be able to look at the competition—crucial, says Hart, in achieving business goals—and decide whether or not there's a need to adapt. The essential vision will stay the same, but the options to get there might need to be reviewed. "The strategy might still be to take that hill, but the tactics will change," he says.

The head teacher

Alan Roach has been head teacher of Chalvedon School and Sixth Form College in Essex for 21 years, and head of the neighbouring Barstable School for two years. He was one of the first winners of education leadership organisation HTI's Go4it Awards. His goal has always remained the same: to transform his schools and help transform the lives of local people. "This is a challenging area, and clearly there is a need for engagement with the local community. I don't see education in isolation from community regeneration," he says.

Though his agenda has remained the same, the conditions Roach has worked in have changed considerably. "In 1988, I was responsible for a £50,000 budget for curriculum development. Staff were appointed by the local authority, and there was little we could do to assert our uniqueness or be entrepreneurial. We could not be in competition with other schools because there was no data."

Soon after Roach was appointed head in 1988, Chalvedon became grant maintained. Once it got its independence, Roach realised the buck stopped with him. "The whole thing becomes a reflection of you. You are indistinguishable from the school you serve. People think of you as the leader and you go to it with a set of principles," he says.

Roach has to be politically astute and realise his short-term goals, but that does not deter him from his long-term aim. "No-one gives you a chance in the long term if you don't achieve in the short term. My feeling is we have to do our level best for these children. But the long-term aim is the transformation of the local community we serve. "I always wanted to lead a school that was the best place to work and best place to be for a child. If that is your standpoint, you are likely to have people going with you."

For Roach, implementing a strategy is partly about leading by example. "If you are a leader and no-one is following you, you are just out for a walk," he says. "But if you believe and live by those principles you will articulate in all you do and all you say."

Growth, of course, brings with it new leadership challenges for heads of organisations. Since Chalvedon, a technology college, merged with Barstable comprehensive school in 2006, Roach says he has had to spread himself a bit more thinly. "When head teachers leave their posts to be advisers they lose the standpoint of the institution they serve," says Roach. "You lose credibility because you are no longer connected. It is important to remain operational and to be involved in policy."

The poker player

For Caspar Berry, strategy in business, and in life, should be like a game of cards. Berry, one time Byker Grove actor, has had a varied career. And he's never been afraid to take a risk. He spent two and a half years as a professional poker player after becoming unhappy with his lot as a screenwriter in Hollywood. "I wanted to make a change in my life," he explains. And he was attracted to a game that could make or break his fortune depending entirely on the decisions he made. "In poker, the decisions we take will make us money—or not," he says.

When he set up his business Twenty First Century Media, a video company that was recently sold to Ten Alps, Berry realised he was applying many of the skills he'd brought to the poker table.

He believes that risk taking and decision-making, the twin elements of the poker game, should be central to the strategies we adopt in both our personal and professional lives. "Decision-making is a science that is little known," he says.

Now a professional speaker on leadership, he uses the lessons of poker to motivate his audiences. He splits his talks into four parts. The first is about him and poker. The second part looks at the similarities between poker and business. The third addresses the relationship between risk and uncertainty. "I explore the science of risk and demonstrate that risk means opportunity," he says. "It can mean failing in the short-term to achieve long-term goals."

It is an analogy, he says, that business audiences connect with. And it leads neatly to his main argument, which is that to succeed in the long term, people must break through their fear of short-term failure. "Even though we know as a poker player that we have to fail, we don't like to fail," he says. He says that fear of failure paralyses people so they don't take decisions and don't work on their strategy. "The truth is that we get more pain from failure than we get pleasure from success. But you have to be prepared to lose yourself in order to gain what you desire. To get to that stage further, you have to risk losing what you have."