The Strategy defines direction, priorities, and resource allocation, helping to guide the innumerable day-to-day decisions of organizations toward their goals.

Every organization needs a strategy to maintain its differentiation and profitability, thus ensuring its long-term sustainability.

Formulating the strategy requires a clear vision of what makes the organization different in its segment of action, as well as the ability to prioritize and allocate resources in order to leverage capabilities toward the company’s goals.

Strategic planning seeks to understand how to position itself in relation to other organizations and create value in the customer segments. In essence, this planning considers key elements of strategy creation such as:

• Information from the organization itself;
• Knowledge of the market of action;
• Tools, techniques and methodologies;
• Understanding the organizational culture;
• Intuition and past experiences.

The ability to execute strategy is more important than the quality of the strategy itself; however, we cannot expect the strategy to be implemented without it being described.

Some strategies are in the minds of the founders or chairmen of the organizations – implicit strategies – and have already caused several business failures when the strategic vision loses, reinforcing the need for a structured process of strategic planning and management in companies. The creation of the strategy is science and art, and the implementation is purely science.

The implementation of the strategy aims to create a structured process in the organization that allows translating the strategy into the day-to-day tasks of the company. For this purpose, it is necessary to establish objectives, indicators and targets, ensuring that the planned results are achieved.

Strategies deal with the future and therefore are hypotheses to be validated. Strategic Management has as main objective to validate these hypotheses, in order to systematically monitor the results, redirecting tactical actions and adjusting the organizational strategy when necessary.

Techniques such as Balanced Scorecard and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are widely used in this management process because they help to write and communicate the logic of the strategy, promoting an alignment of the efforts towards the established goals and objectives.