Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Strategies (2017)

We have a scientist in Denmark called Morten Münster who wrote a book called “Jytte fra marketing er desværre gået for i dag” (Karen from marketing has unfortunately left for the day), in which he talks a lot about the necessity of clear and simple strategies that can be understood by employees at 3pm on a busy Thursday. He has a lot of good examples, but mostly he outlines how silly something a long the lines of “forward together” is as a strategy because it quite literally means nothing to anyone who does any real work.

It agrees with this article, and I always find it kind of hilarious. I do work on the public sector, and we’re exceptionally bad at implementing strategies, despite having hundreds of people working on it. The thing is though, that most of those people have read these articles and books, exactly like this one. So apparently knowing these things aren’t even helping us implement meaningful strategies.

After years in the bureaucracy I’ve long learned to simply keep quiet while these pseudo-workers do their thing, and then get things done when they leave. Then you can always word the work up to sound like it plays into whatever current strategy we’re pursuing at the end of the year review.

If you’re interested in this topic, the best book I’ve read is called Good Strategy Bad Strategy. It’s an excellent read. Here’s the main takeaway:

A real strategy consists of the following parts, which the author calls the “kernel” of a strategy. If any of these are missing, you don’t have a strategy.

1) A diagnosis of the problem or opportunity.

2) A high level guiding policy / hypothesis for how to respond.

3) Coherent Actions that will be your first / primary steps to execute on the strategy.

I’ve found that just getting that idea into my head has transformed the way I think about problems, and plan and communicate responses. I couldn’t recommend the book enough.

“Strategy is choosing what not to do” is the standard trope.

Start-ups sorta get this already: focus on a core base of customers who love your product despite its flaws. Iterate.

The insight I liked best in this article was, “In contrast, top executives should resist the temptation to decide what projects live and die within their firms. Strategy implementation requires top managers to design the company’s internal system that does the selection for them.”

So much your job as an exec is to design the system that gives others enough context and autonomy to flourish.

And hopefully over time that system continues to improve itself.

As a mostly-solo entrepreneur / consultant, I've had some success in shifting professional engagements toward the "strategic consulting" end of the spectrum. I credit author R. Rumelt ("Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"), and FB VP Product J. Zhao ("How to be Strategic") for excellent perspective and actionable advice, which distills down to:

A strategy is a set of actions designed to achieve a particular objective.

The actions need to be credible, coherent, and focused.

Designing them properly takes hard work.

The most practical path to actually being strategic:

1. "Wild Success": Create alignment around what it looks like

2. "Problems / Whose": Deeply grok problem space and its ecosys, and be crystal clear abt what problems looking to solve, and for whom.

3. Prioritize: Focus means saying "no". Cut, ruthlessly, anything inessential.

Working on applying these ideas outside work context, too.

There's a lot of fluff in this article but the main things for me are that strategy includes deciding what not to do, and that it's easy to mistake goals for strategies.

Maybe the best place to see this is sports. How often have you been playing a match, and at some point the coach says "we need to score a goal"? As if that's not obvious. What he needs to say is "keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass".

“Focusing is about saying ‘no,‘” Jobs explained at Apple’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). “You’ve got to say ‘no, no, no’ and when you say ‘no,’ you piss people off.”

I used to read a lot about strategy, but it didn't feel like I was getting anywhere.

The thing is, it's such a big topic, and so context-dependent, that so many "conversations about strategy" end up with the conversants either talking past each other, with Bob and Alice using the same words but meaning different things by them. This is how consultants get their reputations as purveyors of fluff---either the consultant is a space cadet and is talking about generalities without translation into the clients' reality, or the client is not understanding (or not listening to!) the consultant, who is later maligned as a purveyor of fluff.

A lot of the problem stems from people thinking and talking at different layers of abstraction. We all suck at talking about strategy, but programmers are probably the best at understanding why we suck.

For most people, most of the time, we're better off staying concrete.

A strategic plan must also have decision points and alternatives laid out. Not just a direction. Not just the logic behind. What to do when X happens; how far to reach when goals are not being met; how much to spend.

Strategy is choices we make to achieve a goal. Those choices represent implied utility through the reduction in optionality.

Executing a strategy means making the trade offs between utility and opportunity cost, to arrive at a prioritization of choices, and then realizing those opportunity costs.

All this stuff is so obvious, why does it even need to be written down? It's hard to believe that people don't know this intuitively.

I guess there are so many highly paid bureaucrats who don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it that such basic articles have become a necessity.

“If there is one thing I have learned about communicating choices, it is that we always focus on what the choices are. I now realize you have to spend at least as much time on explaining the logic behind the choices.”

This is a great thing to keep in mind for engineering architecture and policy.