I’ve long since reduced my lofty goals as a management writer and educator to two:
- To catalyze a revolution in how we (organizations and managers) develop the next generation of leaders.
- To demystify the concept of strategy and establish this widely misunderstood term, concept, process and activity as a core leadership tool, much like feedback or coaching.
Two very simple, clear, big, hairy audacious goals. Now that you know what propels me, let’s focus on the more vexing of those 2 goals: strategy.
The Myth and Mythology of Strategy
There is no more mystical and in some cases mythical concept in all of business than this 8-letter word. Perhaps because it has been long claimed by academics and expensive consultants and bandied about exclusively by executives in boardrooms, while everyone else waits for the CEO to come down from on high with the clay tablets and of course, clarity, firmly in hand.
Instead of clay tablets and clarity, what usually passes for strategy includes vague goals and even more vague thoughts on how to realize the goals. Tablets go onto shelves after some grand pronouncements, and life moves on much the same as before.
A good friend and wise (and gray) former colleague and I discussed this strategy dysfunction the other night and reflected back on the effort and discipline required to build a healthy, strategy culture and the remarkable benefits that ultimately flow from these efforts. “It’s no wonder most firms don’t get this right…it’s darned hard work,” he exclaimed.
As a sidebar, my informal show of hands polling in workshops, classrooms and keynote sessions indicates that over 50% of people believe that the majority of the individuals in their organizations cannot connect their priorities to a firm’s strategic priorities. Nice way to run a business!
Forget the “S” word for a moment and ask yourself some core questions:
- How are we doing? Really? What do the indicators tell us? How are we faring vis a vis our competitors?
- What’s going on around us in our industry that is impacting us, our competitors, other participants and suppliers to the industry?
- What’s going on in the broader world that either is or likely will impact us?
- What are our customers telling us about what’s going on? What are the vexing problems that they are tackling now…or expect to be tackling in the near future?
- How much do we know about our ideal customers?
- Do we have the solutions to solve their vexing problems? What solutions can we create to help solve emerging problems?
- Based on our insight into industry, market, competitor, world and customer issues, what opportunities are there to expand, change, improve or even change direction and prosper?
- If we are to create new solutions for our customers, how can we do so in such a way as to delight them and exceed their expectations? How can we capture more value in the process…while blocking out competitors?
- What do we need to act on our ideas?
- How do we decide between competing ideas?
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If you start the process of getting people talking about and ultimately acting on the above questions, you’ve moved considerably closer to creating a strategy-focused culture.
- Who should be talking and thinking about these and many other related questions? Everyone…and especially client and market facing employees. These are not executive-only questions.
- When should they be discussed? Constantly. Strategy is a forever, on-going process….not an event.
- Who should take action? As many people as possible, with everyone in a leadership role…from top to bottom encouraging and supporting the development and implementation of ideas that help improve the ability of the firm to win and to create value for employees.
- Who should know how we are doing? Everyone.
- Who should understand the strategy? Everyone. Don’t keep the strategy locked in a drawer like one client that I worked with. He didn’t want his competitors to learn it. Of course, as a consequence, his employees didn’t learn it either.
- Where do ideas come from? Anywhere and anyone.
- What happens when ideas don’t work? Lessons learned must be captured and reflected in next steps. No one gets shot in the learning process. They might get shot for other reasons, but not for pushing the envelope on learning.
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I’ll stop here with this wholly incomplete treatment on a big topic of building a strategy-focused culture, other than to indicate some of the obvious benefits:
- People are focused on creating value…not just getting through the day.
- Success breeds more success.
- The more people talking about the right topics…and t he more empowered people and teams are to implement, the faster the organizations learns to execute, measure, refine and execute some more.
The Bottom Line for Now
Vow to take the myth and mysticism out of strategy on your team. Teach your team the right questions, by learning to ask and answer the right questions. Get people involved and you’ll be amazed at what happens to the health of your business and the energy in your work environment.
Art, as usual you make some excellent points about getting properly focused on strategy…and ask some very pointed questions as well.
What comes to mind for me is something that has always bothered me about business strategy and that is that so many businesses put the customer boldly in the picture when they are “strategizing” but then, on many a level,fail to put that customer’s needs at the top of the list when it comes to execution.
I can’t tell you the number of times I have heard things like, “we put our customer firmly in the centre of everything we do”, (or some such thing), but when problem solving or setting new goals, fail to ask the question, “If we do this how will it affect our customers?”
I think that few organizations are truly customer centric. And yet, when building strategic plans, they feel a certain obligation to make it sound as if they are. This gets in the way of being able to align organizational actions with plans. Because of this, plans and actions come to a parting of the ways pretty quickly.
So I’m thinking that an imperative for organizations when developing strategy is to get real and honest about what they care about and get working on *that* rather than messing around with something that sounds good but requires a major culture shift to execute.
Just a thought 🙂
CEOs and consultants and academics are the ones that write the books and articles about strateg. They love strategy because it’s the cerebral part of business. It doesn’t have any of the messiness of execution.
That makes for “strategies” that are complex, delivered from on high, and frequently changing. It seems more profitable to do things a bit differently than that.
As part of the research for a book that will be out in the spring, my co-author, studied twenty-six companies who had been successful for over decade. We weren’t looking for the answer to the usual question, “What’s the best strategy?” Instead we wanted to identify how companies with a long, strong track record approached strategy.
The answer is that they had simple strategies that could be stated in a sentence or two. Because they stayed with those strategies until they stopped working, they reaped significant benefits. Energy and time and innovation were poured into execution. They were able to build strong cultures with long-serving workforces.
The CEOs of those companies were virtually invisible, though. With the exception of two companies that were among the largest in the world, the CEOs themselves don’t ever get covered in the business press. That’s because there’s no new strategy, re-structuring, or re-organization to report, just the same boring profits year after year.