Recipe For Strategic Disaster: Start With (?)
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How often have you sat in a strategy meeting that started with "let's buy XYZ to leverage capital investment" or "let's shift productions to Bangladesh to save costs" or "let's bring in AI to streamline hiring". This is planning, not strategy.
Moreover, what many claim is strategic planning has nothing to do with strategy. Simply intensioning a verb (planning) with an adjective (strategic) doesn't make something what it claims to be. Planning is about controlling resources at hand. Strategy is about visioning a yet to be future, and that is beyond your control. |
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Or, how often have you attended a strategy meeting that started with the CEO saying "by 2030, all business units need to be #1 or #2 in their category, and if not, fix, sell, or close"* or "alternative protein is the future, and I want to see 30% CAGR across all markets for the next 3 years". This is anchoring bias, not strategy.
Telling the team upfront what "you" want is an expression of the ego-fueled "I know it all" leader-as-hero paradigm. Strategy, on the contrary, is about deep listening to what is possible, drawing out knowing from the team, and deciding to risk being wrong.
That said, it doesn't mean that strategy is all aspiration with no basis in reality. On the contrary, the outcome of strategy is the clear articulation of:
Yeap, strategy is not for the faint-of-heart, because to be strategically fit, just like physical fitness, you need to habituate intentional and consistent training of specific mental skillsets. Which is why there are many wanna-be (armchair) strategists who are, more honestly, planners.
*These are the (in)famous objectives Jack Welch set for General Electric three months after he became CEO. In retrospect, whilst having sustained a 20 year winning streak for GE (on the books), many believed he sowed the seeds for the 2008 financial crisis. Read more here.
What to read next? Try Decision-Making Orientation: Conceptual, Ethical, Tribal.
To find out how I can help you and your organisation co-create a Me-Only corporate strategy, click on the button below to connect with me.
Telling the team upfront what "you" want is an expression of the ego-fueled "I know it all" leader-as-hero paradigm. Strategy, on the contrary, is about deep listening to what is possible, drawing out knowing from the team, and deciding to risk being wrong.
That said, it doesn't mean that strategy is all aspiration with no basis in reality. On the contrary, the outcome of strategy is the clear articulation of:
- What you believe will happen, or want to happen (your theory);
- Why it will happen (your logic); and
- What is needed to make it happen (capabilities you believe is required).
Yeap, strategy is not for the faint-of-heart, because to be strategically fit, just like physical fitness, you need to habituate intentional and consistent training of specific mental skillsets. Which is why there are many wanna-be (armchair) strategists who are, more honestly, planners.
*These are the (in)famous objectives Jack Welch set for General Electric three months after he became CEO. In retrospect, whilst having sustained a 20 year winning streak for GE (on the books), many believed he sowed the seeds for the 2008 financial crisis. Read more here.
What to read next? Try Decision-Making Orientation: Conceptual, Ethical, Tribal.
To find out how I can help you and your organisation co-create a Me-Only corporate strategy, click on the button below to connect with me.