The Merger & Acquisition Leader's Playbook

CHAPTER 3Plans: Strategy Precedes Execution

The third component of the strategic playbook is plans. These flow directly from the investment case and focus choices. Let's start by defining the terms:

• Strategy: The single overarching choice
• Strategic priorities, enablers, and capabilities: in line with the strategy
• Culture: The behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values, environment of the organization

Strategic planning is about generating and selecting options to close gaps between objectives and current realities. It is about the creation and allocation of resources to the right place, in the right way, at the right time, over time to overcome barriers and deliver what matters. Strategic planning is also deciding what you will and will not do.

FIGURE 3.1 The Value Chain

Michael Porter suggests that almost any value chain includes design and invention, production, delivery, and customer service and experience in addition to marketing and selling.¹ Your single, overarching strategy should identify the right way to build and leverage differentially valuable advantages versus competitors at one of the first four while also marketing and selling—which every organization must do one way or another and is discussed in the commercial playbook (Figure 3.1).

Strategic priorities ...