The first imperative—and the heart of every successful strategy implementation—is allocating resources to customers. Therefore, the most critical strategic decision for any business is determining who it is you are trying to serve. Clearly identifying your primary customer will allow you to devote all possible resources to meeting their needs and minimize resources devoted to everything else. This is the path to competitive success.

It's easy to try to duck the tough choice implied by the adjective primary by responding that you have more than one type of customer. This answer is a guaranteed recipe for underperformance: the competitor that has clarity about its primary customer and devotes maximum resources to meet their specific needs will beat you every time.

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Once you're confident that the foundation of your business strategy implementation is sound — you've allocated resources correctly and provided guidance for tough decisions — it's time to get everyone who works for you focused on the job at hand.

Tracking performance goals —requires you to set the right goals, assign accountability, and monitor performance. It's easy to fail this imperative by focusing on the wrong performance indicators or monitoring scorecards that have an overload of irrelevant measures. Underperformance is the result.

It's a business owner's job to ensure that managers are tracking the right things by singling out those variables that spell the difference between strategic success and failure.

Strategic management is vitally important even on the small scale within a business. However, strategic management is difficult to accomplish without a clearly defined set of goals for the business' operation. Knowing what your core competencies are is good from the standpoint of understanding your strengths in the marketplace, but this also helps you to identify areas for improvement and set goals and objectives based on those weaknesses.

If you know, for instance, that your business is lagging behind in utilizing the power of the Internet to sell its products, one of your goals can be to introduce an online trading platform within the next six months. Importantly, the goals your business sets should be measurable, specific and have a time frame attached to them. Setting goals in this way helps you to strategically position your business for future success.

You and your management team are in the conference room, Peter Drucker enters and after introductions, he asks you, "What is the purpose of your business?" How would you answer him?

If you said, to make a profit, he laughs and informs you that, "You don’t know anything about business" and adds, "The answer is not only false, it is irrelevant." He then goes on to explain to you that "THE PURPOSE OF A BUSINESS IS TO CREATE A CUSTOMER."

Here’s what he means by this definition of the Purpose of a Business and what he has written on the subject including the key questions that management needs to ask in order to formulate strategies to create and retain customers. We will not ignore your most likely answer to his question, to make a profit, as Drucker puts profit into its proper perspective later in this article.

So do you know the purpose of your business?

In today’s world, data is the blood that runs in every organization. Google and Facebook are worth billions but consist of nothing more than data about people. Healthcare providers find themselves in a similar state: data tells us about the health of our patients, what diagnosis and tests they have had, what they need next, who is providing and paying it, what we did last week and we need this information real-time. Without this constant flow of data, we could not provide patients the care they deserve. We must treat data like a high-valued corporate asset: developed, used, stored, and protected. Managing data requires a strategy that encompasses the whole organization and addresses more than just technology. The people and processes that produce, transform, govern, and use our data must be a fundamental part of that strategy.