4 easy questions that will tell you if you have a good strategy

An article by Dhiraj Wazir, CEO ROCCO STRATEGY

For starters: Being driven by a strategy without insights …

Is like driving in the night without headlights!.

On a bright sunny day when the road is clearly visible and if there are no tunnels to navigate through, it’s easy-peasy, no-problemo! However as soon as the dark starts to eat up the light, the road ahead doesn’t look so clear anymore, and sometimes even a little bit (or lots) of fog starts to set in. Turns in the road come up as sudden unpleasant surprises; and God help you, if you find yourself on a winding country road without any street lights. It doesn’t matter if you’re driving a Ferrari or a 60-ton lorry. How fast you are or how big you are is not going to change the fact that the only place you are headed for is a crash.

As a business, I’m sure you get the drift (a very slight pun intended), where I’m going with the above analogy. Unfortunately, in our industry there are more companies/teams either:

  • without a strategy because they don’t believe one is required.
  • Understand the importance of a strategy but just haven’t had the time to build one.
  • confuse their goals as their strategy.
  • or simply, have a bad strategy.

Going back to our analogy, for Roaming & Interconnect we have definitely entered twilight, the road ahead has never been so difficult to see. Over the coming months and years things are only going to get more difficult to make sense of, and no I’m not talking about Covid-19. Every business faces multiple and simultaneous challenges be it an MNO or a vendor, and unless you have a clear understanding and insights on how these are interrelated and how they are going to impact your business, how would you even go about building a strategy?

When it comes to roaming the BAU (Business As Usual) era; the era where “this year you try to do exactly what you did last year but a bit better”, pretty much ended in 2019 with Covid. By the time we start to see travel recovery, the technology change with decommissioning, VoLTE, eSim, 5G amongst others will leave the roaming business unrecognisable.

If you are an MNO have you thought about, small things like the impact BCE will have on your business reporting built on data from TAP? Or about potentially massive disruptions like the impact low orbit satellite networks like Starlink could have on the roaming business? If you’re a vendor, do you have insights on the challenges your customers will face when deploying 5G SA Roaming? Which of your product offerings will still be relevant or indeed become much more relevant? Do value added services matter to your customers whose business is struggling for revenues, or are they even more important now as they try and re-coup some of the lost revenues?

If you think this is too far out in the future, but you have a strategy for now! Here’s a quick and simple check-list you can go through to ascertain if you have a winning strategy:

  1. Are your insights based on:

    A) Independent, unbiased research.

    B) Off free reports/white papers from vendors who are trying to sell their solutions.

  2. Have you made:

    A) Hard choices, things that you WON’T be doing.

    B) Trying to do a little bit of everything?

  3. Does your strategy:

    A) Recognise the competency, resources and skills you have access to.

    B) You think your strategy will drive your competency.

  4. Is your strategy an answer to:

    A) a “How” question

    B) a “What” question?

The above list is by no means exhaustive, but if the answer to any of the above is “B”, then you really don’t have a strategy or worse have a really bad one.

The business world is littered with examples of failures of strategy, let’s just look at Yahoo. Did you know they had a chance to buy Google, but didn’t because they thought that the search market wasn’t big enough. Then they had a chance to turn Flickr into a social media site, but bungled it up. Post that they almost had a chance to buy Facebook but didn’t. They even had an offer to be acquired by Microsoft for over $44 Billion but rejected the offer, instead trying to buy multiple companies and trying to do a little bit of everything without a clear strategy or vision.

Only if they’d known that by being driven by a strategy without insights … Is like driving in the night without headlights.

For further insights to help build your strategy write to us at hq@rocco.group