It’s a cross between strategy and pizza. Easy.
The Strategeria is based on the idea that a company is like a pizza.
To cook a truly mouthwatering pizza, you can’t only focus on getting the dough right. Similarly, you can’t spend all your time on just the tomato sauce, or the cheese, the toppings or on the process. Everything needs to come together in a melty, crispy and perfectly balanced symphony of deliciousness.
In the same way, a thriving company is the product of a finely tuned combination of strategy, responsibility, brand and customer experience. Behind it all, every day’s inspiration and implementation needs to stem from the right attitude, something that is intentionally designed.
All companies can find their focus and inspiration simply by thinking about their favourite pizza in the right way. Keeping in mind your favourite pizza and its five key ingredients will give your organisation continuous focus and inspiration.
So what can a visit to the Strategeria do for you?
Why do we need a Strategeria?
The reason is simple: approximately 96.7% 1) of companies need more focus and inspiration. And more importantly, we all love pizza. 2)
Most of today’s existing models and buzzwords relating to systems, strategies and business are simply too complex and confusing. And there’s too much of it, we get lost and bored. As a result, changes are too often poorly executed. Or, despite a big launch with laser show and inspirational speakers, end up being totally forgotten.
It is fair to say that we need something simpler. Something more intuitive. Something we can easily and quickly reconnect to.
Something like our favourite pizza. Yes, that’s right. Continuously thinking about your favourite pizza can be the path to clarity and inspiration. This is the essence of the Strategeria, and the way to keep your company focused and inspiring in the long term.
Think pizza and you’ll see clearly again
Let us demonstrate how this clunky yet efficient idea works. It’s an average Tuesday afternoon at work, you’re pretty bored. Suddenly, into your mind pops an image of your favourite pizza. You close your eyes. You can smell that comforting aroma of dough baking and the savoury toppings. You can feel your teeth working through that mix of crispy underneath and sloppy on top, can’t you? Now your mouth his watering. Mmmmmm. It’s all getting a bit much. You’re about to take a bite out of your laptop.
But oh mama, you’re so fired-up right now that you could run through a thick wall of pizza dough. You are ready to work hard to get that pizza! You promise yourself you’ll do an extra 20 minutes on the treadmill. You’ll finally get that overdue PowerPoint presentation ready in record time. All this so that you’ll have earned your favourite pizza this evening when you sit down to watch Baywatch reruns.
Simply put, you feel focused and motivated and you are actually doing the work needed to reach that vision of yours, in this case to eat that pizza.
In the same way, we need a model in the business world that inspires in us a similar kind of Pavlovian behaviour. But in a good way.
OR
In the same way, we need a model in the business world that gets us up and out there and ready to take on whatever we set our mind to.
What we need is a model that is built on a thought-through system. A system that makes sense of the key components a company needs in order to shine. A way to join up those separate components to deliver something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. A model that gives us clarity for the long term, and executional speed and confidence in the short term. And above all, is easy to approach and remember.
This is what sets great companies apart, allowing them to outperform their confusing and boring rivals year after year. They have an easily digestible, interconnected system which guides them them both in the long and short term. And an accessible model to keep the focus and inspiration high day to day.
Let’s have a closer look at what ingredients are needed to cook up a favourite pizza for your company. OR - Let’s have a closer look at what you need in order to cook up a favourite pizza for your company.
The ingredients – OR – High-quality, locally sourced ingredients
To make the pizza model work for your company in a meaningful way, we need to consider the five secret ingredients. And above all, we need to understand that just as when baking a pizza, those five ingredients need to be interconnected and well-balanced. The dough needs to work with the tomato, cheese and toppings, while the heat in the wood oven needs to be perfect. And it needs to cook for just the right amount of time.
This same level of interconnectedness needs to be achieved when defining and managing a company. Way too often, we end up letting a company’s different functions go off in different directions, leaving us with a tangled mess of different perspectives.
So here are those must-have ingredients:
1. Strategy. Find your purpose and focus on the right opportunity in a way that inspires your entire organisation.
2. Responsibility. Ensure that you work as responsibly as possible by defining a clear responsibility approach that is highly intertwined with your strategy.
3. Brand strategy. Make sure that your company is likeable, differentiates you, makes you relevant and ownable.
4. CX. Serve your customers for the long-term and be helpful. Is your customer experience delivering this?
5.Attitude. Studies show us that companies are way too serious and stressed out in their daily operations, stifling both people and the businesses. Being all serious never did anything for anyone except by killing off a few new, expensive strategies.
These are the five ingredients you need to design and build your ‘company pizza’. They will give you the right components in place to build a system that enables your company to win. By approaching these five components as an interconnected system that needs to continuously melt together, you will create a bigger pizza for all.
A slice for all stakeholders
OK, so your favourite pizza is fresh out of the oven and smelling great. But there is one final problem.
Your favourite pizza is too small, there’s simply not enough to share around. It would have been nice to give a slice to your loved one, one to a friend, one to grandma. Heck, why not also share the deliciousness dividends with the couple on the next table?
For The Good Days Strategeria believes that a great pizza should always be shared. In the same way, a business should consider everyone who's involved in their value creation. This means employees and owners, but also society, the environment and whoever can be considered a stakeholder. This is how you bake a pizza and also run a company that is responsible. We should see the value creation through the eyes of all stakeholders.
Think pizza and gain!
So that’s the idea of the Strategeria and the pizza model. It’s so simple that it makes your toes ache. Just think about our favourite pizza, that’s it!
That is all we need to remind ourselves what the most essential questions are that keep us on the right track for the long term. Now, to set that pizza cooking, you need to define those different components and make sure they are interconnected and support each other. That is something we are happy to help with.
Welcome to the Strategeria, where we will be discussing all these topics, in this blog.
Footnotes - They are all made up - but also pretty much true.
About For The Good Days
We need to be transparent with you. The For The Good Days Strategeria has never been within munching distance of winning any Michelin stars.
But over the last 14 years we have always used the best raw ingredients, armfuls of insight and a pinch of magic seasoning to serve up company strategies, brand strategies and responsibility approaches that let you become more.
Focused, inspirational, relevant, responsible and a little less serious!
Now that is what the Strategeria is all about – delivering more of those good days for all of us.
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