Meeting wtih A Former Student on His Strama Paper.

Promoting Entrepreneurial Revolution

I met this afternoon with a former student on entrepreneurship student who is now making his final paper for his MBA graduation:   his strama paper.  I demurred on his initial request, because I am just a facilitator on entrepreneurship and not on strategic management.

However, since I had a meeting at Megamall, near his place of work, I decided to see him, and give my 5 cents worth of comment.

These were the things I told him:

l.  A strama like a business plan is all about proving;  you prove everything you say and plan of action with data and facts.  You can not make motherhood statements;  you must provide a basis for expanding into a market, or making a certain % as your growth rate.

2.  As part of critical thinking, you question the source of your data vis a vis against reality (on Execution, insist on reality).  reality, even if the source of your data is a respected think tank.  If a think tank says that the sales will grow for the next five years, and if today, you are on a 3 day work week, it is time to junk that projection, and even yours on your strama based on that think tank findings;

3.  A strategy is a collection of activities and resources to attain your objectives.  And one of that objectives is to defeat the competition, and to be UNIQUE.  Are you unique, what is your unique selling proposition?  How do you propose to achieve that?   Because of the myriad of tools under David, and the use of generic strategies:   retrenchment, liquidation, concentric diversification, product development, market development, the idea of uniqueness is missed entirely.  And the strama paper ends up of perpetuation of last year, and what the company has been doing and strategy is lost.

4.  Always remember SMART.  Although you end up with generic strategy, have a clear picture do:  the 5w, lH  (the timeline, resources, processes)  Do not end with saying that you will do more study afterwards for this strategy  (hey what are we doing , a strategy for more studies)

5.  I was not able to discuss this, discuss external environment that spells out in monetary terms what sales amount can be derived from a specific macro or micro market developments.  Make a guessitimate.  Like the Bill Gates question on how many basketball can you load on a bus this size if the size of basketball is this?  or How many pins on thimble if the diameter of the thimble is this, and the diameter of a pin is this size?  You can not obtain all the data, but you can make an intelligent guess, or projection.  Do not just guess, or be clueless on what you should do.

I hope this is useful for other strama students too.

I hope this makes sense for an entrep prof addressing strama students.  It is even more demanding for an entrepreneur to be strategic  because he must achieve outstanding results if he must survive even WITHOUT RESOURCES OR EVEN KNOWLEDGE OF PROCESSES (technology)  Can you beat that?