Strategy, made practical.
A practical strategy method for founders and SMEs in MENA markets: diagnosis, choices and a plan you can actually execute.
Strategy is not a document; it is a small set of hard choices about where to play and how to win. For SMEs in MENA markets, the trap is a plan too big to execute. Here is a leaner method.
01 Diagnose honestly
Name the real challenge, not the symptom. Declining sales is a symptom; the challenge might be a shifted market, a pricing mismatch or a channel that stopped working. Get this wrong and everything downstream is wasted effort.
02 Make a guiding choice
Decide where you will compete and where you will not. Trying to serve everyone is the most common SME strategy mistake, and the most expensive.
03 Commit to coherent actions
- A handful of initiatives that reinforce each other
- Clear owners and deadlines, not aspirations
- A few metrics reviewed on a fixed cadence
- The discipline to stop what is not working
04 Regional reality
Strategy in Lebanon, the Gulf and wider MENA has to account for currency, regulation and relationship-driven markets. A plan that ignores local reality is a plan for a country you do not operate in.
05 Why most strategies die in the drawer
The failure is rarely the thinking; it is the gap between the plan and the week. A strategy that lives in a slide deck changes nothing. The ones that work are translated into a short list of things people actually do differently on Monday, owned by named individuals, with a date. If nothing in anyone's calendar changes because of the strategy, there is no strategy — only a document.
06 The one-page test
If your strategy cannot fit on a single page, it is not yet a strategy — it is a wish list. The discipline of one page forces the hard choices: what you are betting on, what you are deliberately not doing, and the few numbers that tell you whether it is working. A team can hold one page in its head. It cannot execute forty.
Strategy is not an annual event; it is a habit of revisiting. Set a fixed cadence — monthly for the metrics, quarterly for the choices — and use it to kill what is not working as readily as to double down on what is. Markets in Lebanon and the Gulf move faster than any yearly plan can anticipate. The businesses that stay ahead are the ones willing to change their mind on schedule, with evidence in front of them.
Independent sources
Every link was checked and live at the time of writing.
Harvard Business ReviewWhat Is Strategy?Harvard Business ReviewThe Five Competitive Forces That Shape StrategyGoogle Cloud101 real-world generative AI use casesLinks open in a new tab. Manara is not affiliated with these publishers.
Manara Consultancy is a Beirut-based advisory firm helping companies, founders and professionals across Lebanon and the Gulf make the decisions that define them. More at manaraconsultancy.online.