Strategy Plain and Simple

Assessing the balance of risk and opportunity

When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

John F. Kennedy

Here is what you do. Go through each part of the strategy development process again, especially the sections on market demand and industry competition, and pull out what seem to be the main risks and opportunities.

Assess them from two perspectives:

• How likely are they to take place – low, medium or high?
• If they do occur, how large an impact will they have – low, medium or large?

Now isolate what we shall term the ‘big’ risks and opportunities, as defined by those where the likelihood of occurrence is:

• medium (or high) and impact is high;
• high ...