It’s Saturday morning at 5am and I’m prepping for a panel. Unlike the typical conference panel where most of my audience sits firmly glued to their iPhones and Blackberries, I will be addressing a room full of smart, passionately engaged participants eager to hear my various “pearls” of wisdom. Oh my.

I was asked to participate in Alverno’s 3rd Annual Executive Exchange MBA Panel. For those of you lucky enough to be familiar with Alverno, you’re smiling about now. Alverno students are not the sit on your hands and wait to be called on kind of folks. Alverno is all about empowered students with well informed and thoughtful perspectives. And the questions I’ve been asked to prep for today’s panel will quickly give you an idea what I’m in for.

“Strategy is an often overused and misunderstood word/term. From your experience, what is strategy and who owns strategy? How does the executive management team work most effectively together in order to make the best decisions around a multitude of variables and disciplines?”

Nice question. Yikes! For start-up CEOs, strategy is a dynamic process that can quickly make or break a new venture. Here’s how strategy works in my world:

* Great strategy with mediocre implementation = doom
* Mediocre strategy with great implementation = doom
* Exceptional strategy with near flawless execution = possible survival

I could say the same for large scale ventures, but the time table is different. Thanks to client and investor inertia, a lot of strategic errors can be covered up or simply missed… until it’s too late. The financial collapse provided us a ring side seat into that insanity. How could such glaring risks and strategic missteps be made? In a large, well-capitalized organization, inertia covers a great many sins.

In a start-up, small missteps in strategy are quickly magnified and can spell disaster.

My core definition of strategy is: What’s the end game? What should the direction and scope of our company be over the long-term? Strategy considers the core values that define the inner workings of the company and uses them as a prism through which to evaluate new opportunities, weigh potential risks, and determine the optimal organizational trajectory to increase long-term shareholder value.

Good strategy, in my opinion, is good stewardship. You take what you know (e.g., values, market conditions, resources at hand) and you figure out the optimal path to take you to the desired long-term outcome. Good strategy helps an organization maintain clarity and focus when the din of the unknown bangs relentlessly on the door. Is that opportunity knocking or the multi-headed hydra of distraction braying? To an untrained ear and occasionally a seasoned one, they sound frighteningly the same.

In other words, strategy defines:

* Direction
* Available markets
* Activities likely to succeed in those markets or the scope

While taking into careful consideration:

* Stakeholder values and expectations
* Competitive advantage
* Resources necessary to compete effectively
* Business climate

If strategy stays at the top of an organization, that strategy will fail. Strategy is an iterative process that relies on a constant feed of facts and impressions from line managers and employees. If those team members are not fully engaged or spun up on the strategy, an organization hobbles itself from making the necessary course corrections. Strategy is like a printed out early version of Google maps in a rural, rarely driven city. Without constant real-time observations and corrections, you are very likely to run off the road.

So for strategy to work, it needs to be communicated – constantly and consistently. Real-time, interactive feedback mechanisms are mission critical. Executive proclamations and annual meetings are not nearly enough.

At HarQen, our strategy has evolved “considerably” over the last three years. Our core mission is to solve thorny business process issues that are expensive and emotionally unsatisfying via innovative visual voice applications. We constantly scan the horizon for problems that we can solve and weigh them against this core values. Our core values are innovation, fun and maximizing return. We added the financial dimension because it’s more than a scorecard – it keeps us away from creating low business value but high innovation apps.

We have a monthly all team meeting, plus a 30 minute call at the start of each week. We discuss strategy at the monthly meeting and report back progress. The weekly call is simply a status check-in to ensure we didn’t stumble across anything that could derail us. On a real-time basis, the team uses Yammer and Basecamp to communicate. I have caught more than my fair share of miscommunications and strategic missteps simply by checking in and reading the daily log.

So the question at hand is: Have we had exceptional strategy and near flawless execution? No. What we have had is the right mechanisms in place to catch strategic errors very quickly and correct, correct, and correct again. It’s kept us on the road and competing well during a time when start-ups are piled sky-high off the road. We are a living, breathing example of failing fast and fixing it.