LET’S cut to the chase: when we talk about getting one over on the competition what we really want is to make more money than they do.

Business brains can’t agree on a definition for strategy, but they do agree that the bottom line is always measured in pounds and pence.

And there are, according to Don Sull, a professor of strat- egic and international management at London Business School, just three ways to make, and keep on making, money in business. These are:

Seize an opportunity by exploiting a gap in the market. Current examples include the electronic ink manufacturer E.Ink and the internet call service Skype.

Own a scarce resource or skill; think of De Beers’ diamonds or the cutting-edge curves of Apple computers.

Keep the competition out — the two most effective barriers are patents or money. If you can, do something really expensive that no one else can afford to follow, for example, BT’s landline monopoly.

But if you’re really smart you do two or three of these, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did. Page and Brin seized the opportunity for a really good internet search engine and owned the scarce technological skills to make it work. Luckily for them they also had the nous to change the name of their search engine from BackRub to Google.

Sull says that if he had to devise a strategy, then the questions he’d ask would spin out from these three points: opportunity, scarcity and competition. What is the unmet customer need? What resources or skills really matter to this company? How are we going to carve out our position? How do we keep competitors away? Cooking up a strategy is all about asking questions and setting targets. But it’s not rocket science, according to Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE: “In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell. The more you think about it, and the more you grind yourself down in data and details, the more you tie yourself into knots about what to do. That’s not strategy, that’s suffering.”

In his book, Winning, he outlines his guide to “coming up with the big aha for your business”. It is similar to Sull’s and revolves around analysing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (otherwise known as SWOT).

But all this navel-gazing sounds so dull. Surely strategy should be about flashes of inspiration? It is, says Gary Hamel, a strategy guru. He writes in Strategy Bites Back: “The dirty little secret of the strategy industry is that it doesn’t have any theory of strategy creation. Whenever we come across a brilliantly successful strategy, we are all inclined to ask: ‘Was it luck, or was it foresight?’ A key thing to remember is that truly innovative strategies are always, and I mean always, the result of lucky foresight.” The question is: Do you feel lucky?

Times Recommends

• Inspirational leadership
• How to get a new job
• The reluctant CEO