Decision Leverage™ is a term applied to a set of powerful commercial techniques that are strategic rather than operational.

“You could spend weeks training and toiling to reduce your company’s operational costs by one percent next year and when you’d achieved your goal you would have a bottom line cash improvement that may only be a fraction of a single percentage point. On the other hand, you might develop a whole new approach, in a matter of days or even hours, that doubled, tripled or increased even more, your net earnings.”

The skills needed for operational excellence, although vital when executing a given strategy, are not those that produce winning strategies in the first place. Operational superiority comes from detailed, performance and delivery oriented thinking. It rightly ignores the vagaries of the future and is immediate and action-focused. Strategic thinking deals with long-term important issues that have the power to change results by orders of magnitude. It is highly creative and presses its way through a large number of different plans, carefully analysing how the fuzziness of the future will impact on each. And, finally, it aligns the company’s board behind the single approach that delivers superior value through all the combinations that have been explored.