Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
chrisbolman.com
chrisbolman.com
1. There are great insights in Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. The focus of that book is on Disruptive Innovation, where a new upstart with some new tech/angle crushes your business. A lot of your notes/principles here are captured in that book concisely.
2. One thing that is useful for employees to understand is how their company creates and executes on a strategy. It's crazy to me how many guides there are on strategy when most individuals do 0 strategy setting. The result is that you think of a great strategy, get shot down for whatever reason, and just grumble about how the "execs don't get it". It's much more fruitful to understand how the big dawgs are setting their strategy and what models they're using, and then you can figure out how to operate and innovate in that context.
3. Your comments on insight and research reminded me of Charlie Munger's talks on Mental Models. The basic idea is that you learn from a bunch of disciplines and your brain starts to tie things together and you'll produce insights. Shane over at Farnam Street (https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/) has a great guide and intro.
Overall, I enjoyed reading your post and am impressed by the level of research. Great job.
2. Could not agree more with this (and have seen a lot of first-hand pain here). One of the biggest generators of employee anxiety is simple uncertainty, and uncertainty is a product of inadequate visibility into and/or understanding of how and why things are happening. That's again one of the reasons why I feel every org/team needs a framework like V2MOM, because that's a hierarchical structure for documenting and communicating a strategy in a way that gets employees participating in its development, execution, measurement and refinement.
3. +1 here too. I link out to the Farnam street post in mine.
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2013/04/how-to-create-alignm...
Because your system and structure is not good as theirs were. It is not luck, it is competence. Not survivorship bias, but you overestimating yourself.
Market structure: i can see workplaces(or maybe big events) licensing via, keeping control of the user, and offering free ride services from home/work to the cheapest transportation bidder, for example. Thus workplaces will keep all the "network effect" and market power.
The money quote is the part about insight:
The best strategies are built on top of great insights. Generally, I'd consider a strategic insight to be an understanding of “the true nature of something” (a customer need, market dynamic, or future trend) and/or its relationship to other important environmental factors. There's also a forecasting component to insights. Strategic insights commonly identify opportunity gaps in time — such as the difference between the current state of something and its anticipated future state.
One thought on the building blocks summary - I would add an Ideation phase after the Insights phase or somehow mention the importance of ideas. The current outline suggests strategy creation is a highly analytical process, when, in fact, it is both creative and analytical at the same time, and requires both sets of skills.
As a side note, you might want to check out the work of Victor Cheng who introduces a lot of McKinsey strategic tools in his book and video series. Could be helpful for your future work!
Marketing strategy covers anything related to sales/revenue, such as customers, products, channels or communications.
Corporate strategy covers long term business policies of a firm, and is best understood through an economics lens. Things like make vs. buy decisions, competitive advantage, market and industry analysis.
But I find it useful to distinguish between them, as do most business schools. Mergers are part of corporate strategy that only somewhat involve marketing considerations. Advertising is marketing strategy that doesn't have much to do with corporate strategy. A decision to enter new markets would be in the overlap area.
Anyway I thought the original article was just vague consultant speak.
Let's take a successful product: Pacman. Launch it in 2017 instead of 1980, the result would not be as good.
Few thoughts, In my opinion, leaders communicate the mission, vision and values, but never clearly communicate the strategy. The strategy for each department and team and it’s sub-teams with-in an org will be different. This has to be communicated at all levels to have the entire workforce work towards the single mission.
Many Startups are successful due to this.
This is why I think a hierarchical, cascading V2MOM or OKR approach is a helpful communication vehicle to transfer strategy top-down and build consensus and participation in the strategy process bottom-up.
I just want to add that with regard to definitions of the term strategy, , one could do worse than follow Jack Welch:
"The evolution of a central plan through a continually changing set of circumstances"