A VETERAN OWNED SMALL BUSINESS | Call or text now for a FREE consultation: +1 (770) 765-3692 | 
How to Turn a Great Strategic Principle into Great Results
Results start with a strong strategic principle – a shared objective about what the organization wants to accomplish. The strategic principle guides the company’s allocation of scarce resources – money, time, and talent.
The strategic principle doesn’t merely aggregate a collection of objectives.
Rather, this simple statement captures the thinking required to build a sustainable competitive advantage that forces trade-offs among competing resources, tests the soundness of particular initiatives, and sets clear boundaries within which decision makers must operate.
Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:
Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!
About the Author
For more than 30 years, Linda Henman has helped leaders in Fortune 500 Companies, small businesses, and military organizations define their direction and select the best people to put their strategies in motion. Linda holds a Ph.D. in organizational systems, two Master of Arts degrees in interpersonal communication and organizational development, and a Bachelor of Science degree in communication. By combining her experience as an organizational consultant with her education in business, she offers her clients selection, coaching, and consulting solutions that are pragmatic in their approach and sound in their foundation.
Mahesh Rao, a dynamic, creative, and highly-skilled executive consultant with more than 20 years of business experience, holds 14 US and international patents. Some have been industry-shaping. In 2005 he won the Japanese government’s Most Valuable Patent award. Mahesh has received numerous corporate, client, and industry accolades for coaching senior executives at Fortune 100 companies to become successful transformation leaders and organizational innovators. He has also founded startups that were taken through acquisition. His work with large global companies, including Mitsubishi – and his wide exposure to numerous industries, schools of thought, practices, organizational needs, and corporate responsibilities – account for his consummate ability to advance a vision through strategizing, planning, and execution on a global scale while managing risks. Mahesh Rao’s extensive travel and keen cultural awareness, along with his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, contribute to his ability to see processes clearly, from the big picture to the details. To read Mahesh Rao’s complete biography, 
All business leaders are human and some get overly enamored with and excited about a particular business opportunity. These business leaders then direct either a business case or project plan to be developed which is immediately funded; circumventing the organization’s business planning process. In these cases, the initiative’s ability to meet the organization’s business objectives and goals remains uncertain and consideration of competing opportunities is forfeit. In some organizations, entire portfolios are determined in this fashion; leaving leaders blind with respect to their ability to optimally achieve the organization’s mission goals.
John Hamm is one of the top leadership experts in Silicon Valley. He was named one of the country’s Top 100 venture capitalists in 2009 by AlwaysOn and has led investments in many successful high-growth companies as a partner at several Bay Area VC firms. Hamm has also been a CEO, a board member at over thirty companies, and a CEO adviser and executive coach to senior leaders at companies such as Documentum, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, TaylorMade-adidas Golf and McAfee. John teaches leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. To read John Hamm’s full biography, 
Business Programs