What "ingredients" do you need to gather before you can develop a business strategy?

A clear read of four things: the market, your current and potential customers, your own strengths and weaknesses, and your competitors' strengths and weaknesses.

* The four inputs a strategy is built from: two look outward (market, competitors), two look inward (customers, own capabilities). *

Business is the classic proving ground for strategy — "there's something to win" — and you usually start in front of a concrete problem you must solve. Before you can choose a direction, you gather a few standard inputs:

• The market — where is it heading, and where are the openings?
• Current and potential customers — whose needs are you actually serving, and who could you serve?
• Your own strengths and weaknesses — what can you do well now, and where would you have to develop or buy in capability?
• Competitors' strengths and weaknesses — where are rivals strong, and where do they leave gaps?

These four viewpoints are the raw material a strategy is built from — and they map almost one-to-one onto Mintzberg's later "strategy bridge" (looking from above = the market, from below = your own strengths/weaknesses, sideways = the competitors). Gather them first; the bridge is just the method that organises them.

Tip: Two of the four look outward (market, competitors) and two look inward (the customers you serve, your own capabilities) — the same inside/outside split that SWOT and the strategy bridge formalise.

Go deeper:

• Strategic management (Wikipedia) — how firms gather these inputs and turn them into strategy, tying together SWOT, Porter's forces, and the planning cycle.