Making Great Strategy: A Masterclass with Jesper Sørensen

<p>Welcome to Grit &amp; Growth’s masterclass on strategy, featuring Jesper Sørensen’s insights on how to build a strategy for success and accept the inherent uncertainty of it all. This Stanford Graduate School of Business professor tells you what you need to know: from defining what a strategy is — and is not — to deciding who to involve and how to debate constructively.&nbsp;</p><p>Every entrepreneur understands that their business needs a well-thought-out strategy to succeed. But the gap between knowing and doing can be daunting. Professor Sørensen, coauthor of <em>Making Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage</em>, advocates for “starting at the end” by asking what it is you want to accomplish and what success looks like. “Then,” he explains, “you can start to say, okay, now here's all these things that we think might connect to what we want to accomplish.”&nbsp;</p><p>While creating a strategy is a process that requires ongoing refinement, Sørensen reminds leaders to put their strategy into practice and learn along the way. What’s more, he cautions that successful execution depends on how well you communicate your strategy. He believes that everyone in your organization needs to understand the strategy and see themselves in it, because their work contributes directly to its success.</p><p>If you want to hear more on strategy from Jesper, check out our episode <a href="https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/strategy-its-big-bets-matter" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Strategy: It's the Big Bets that Matter</em></a>.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>8 Masterclass Takeaways&nbsp;</strong></p><p><strong>A strategy is not a list of things you want to accomplish. </strong>“Essentially a strategy expresses the logic of success for the organization. How are we going to get the resources that we need in order to accomplish what it is we want to accomplish? You need to be able to articulate some sort of theory of how causes lead to consequences, how inputs lead to outputs, how actions lea