You cannot Be Playing Bet9ja With Your Strategy

In Nigeria, playing Bet9ja means leaving your success to chance — hoping a lucky code will secure your win. In business, that’s a dangerous way to operate.

Yet many managers, founders, and business owners unknowingly gamble with their strategy every day. They chase trends because they “feel” right, copy competitors because “it’s working for them,” or throw resources at projects without a clear strategic foundation.

This is not strategy. This is riverboat gambling — and the odds are not in your favor.

The Real Challenge: Finding the Blue Oceans

In Blue Ocean Strategy, the goal is to identify commercially compelling opportunities that set you apart from the competition — not fight over the same red waters everyone is already bleeding in.

But here’s the catch: out of the haystack of possibilities available to you, only a handful will truly move the needle. And without a disciplined approach, you risk making your big bets on the wrong ones.

That’s why managers cannot afford to be sportybet-ing their way through decision-making. Strategy is not a lucky draw — it’s a deliberate, thoughtful process.

The Simplest Strategy Framework You Can Use

Richard Rumelt, in his classic Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, offers a refreshingly simple — but deeply effective — three-part framework for building a winning strategy.

1. Diagnosis – Know Your Real Problem

Too many strategies fail because leaders are solving the wrong problem. Your first task is to truly understand the nature of the challenge your business faces.Ask yourself:

• What is the single most important barrier to our growth right now?

• What evidence do I have that this is the real problem, not just a symptom?

You can’t solve everything at once — so choose the problem that, if solved, will have the highest impact.

2. Guiding Policy – Decide How You’ll Think

This is the philosophy that shapes your decisions. Your guiding policy isn’t a slogan — it’s the strategic filter that helps you say yes to the right things and no to distractions.Examples:

• “We will always choose depth over breadth.”

• “We will innovate for value, not novelty.”

When a new opportunity arises, you check it against your guiding policy. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fly.

3. Coherent Actions – Do the Right Few Things

Strategy dies when it tries to do everything at once. Your actions should be few, focused, and aligned — each step reinforcing the others to create momentum.The question to ask: What are the smallest number of things we can do that will create the biggest impact?

This is how you move from wishful thinking to measurable progress.

The Crescere Way: No Gambling, Just Clarity

At Crescere, we believe clarity is a competitive advantage. We help leadership teams replace guesswork with grounded, evidence-based strategy — uncovering the right problems to solve, defining guiding policies that keep them focused, and mapping actions that lead to real results.

In business, the house always wins when you gamble. But when you think strategically, you become the house.

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