Don't Be So F*cking Strategic | Hacker News Reader

Don't Be So F*cking Strategic

sriramk.tumblr.com

This reminds me of the Joker quote from The Dark Knight;

The Joker: Do I really look like a guy with a plan?...I just... do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans... they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

This is how I feel about "strategy sessions", these "strategy sessions" are almost always held by businessmen wannabes and lead to nothing but bullshit and guesses presented as facts.

Just go out and do it then come back with your findings now you have facts that you can work with.

The Joker in Dark Knight executed some very careful and involved plans. For example, your quote is taken from his conversation with Dent, which was the final step of his plan to drive Dent crazy. Hell, remember the heist that the film starts with? Does it look unplanned?

This is totally off topic, but the fact that The Joker eschews planning could also be part of the theme of him being an "unstoppable force" rather than just a man. He symbolizes man's darker nature and tendencies.

Having a Plan and thinking more than 24 hours into the future don't neccesarily have to be the same thing. I took his use of "plan" in the grander sense. Why did he plot to drive Dent crazy? Who knows, he has no Plan, he just did it.

I'd argue that you're talking about tactics not strategy here.

I'd argue that people still think they are unrelated because they saw a politician say that once in a debate.

Joker's tactics were used to execute on his overall strategy of robbing banks for a specific goal, getting close to specific people.

While I agree with Sriram's overall point in this post, I think your comment shows there is another point Sriram is making (but not explicitly):

   Have a plan, but know that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Planning/strategy sessions can be very, very useful in helping to form a plan early on. They expose ideas and roadblocks and hard questions. They are a MEANS to an end and that END is NOT a strategy. It's a set of hard problems, ideas to pursue, and a framework for making decisions (and sticking to them) that is the END.

So don't take Sriram's advice too literally. He's not saying "Don't plan". He's not saying "Don't ever think about strategy". What he's saying is, like everything in life, do it with moderation.

"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." --Eisenhower

"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." --Patton

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

You articulated this better than I did

Yes, and don't go off your rocker if things deviate.

Please cite billion dollar corporations that do not hold strategy sessions.

While the lack of such corporations do not automatically show the usefulness of strategy sessions, they do put the onus on you to prove otherwise if you are taking the position that they are almost never of much use.

"Please cite billion dollar corporations that do not hold strategy sessions."

HP? RIM? (</snark>)

Snarky, but an important note:

Just because you do something, does not mean you're good at it.

That's nice. That's actually a better analogy than the one I used in my post :)

Off topic, but can we please stop pretending that an asterisk means you didn't just say "fucking"? That is pure superstition.

If you're going to use a word, use it. If not, don't. Fuck.

I don't because in the past, I found it trips proxies and content filters people have ( surprising but true)

I believe it's used to pass censoring filters.

I actually think it's politer and more agreeable to use the asterisk. It's akin to presenting a photo of a bare-chest woman with the nipples striked-out with a black line. Everybody knows what is there, but it makes the picture a lot more agreeable and less obscene.

If you know what the word is, an asterisk doesn't hide anything. If you don't (what are you, 3?), there's nothing to hide.

I don't think nudity is obscene either, but I can see why people might want to remain private. Just because I know what a nipple looks like doesn't mean I know what YOUR nipple looks like.

And of course, to a large segment of the population striking out bare breasts makes the picture a lot less agreeable.

Personally, I find the nipple thing pretty inane as well. I have no idea how anyone benefits from covering them up, especially when it gets to a point where the nipple is the only part of the breast covered.

I don't really see how its particularly less "obscene", nor how someone who would normally find the picture disagreeable would suddenly find acceptance because of a token gesture censoring a small portion of the photo.

Heh, I honestly can't tell whether you're serious or not...

I will agree that it is exactly the same situation.

Tou you and the author, stop being so damned vulgar.

Why can't I have a filter on this site that lets me trash articles and posts with vulgar words in them?

Like most words we use for business, strategy is also off course a term from the military. But people confuse the terms "strategy, tactics, technology, operations" and call it all strategy.

If you have 500.000 soldiers, someone has to think about how to use this force in a smart way. Otherwise it will be a mess and nobody knows what to do or end up fight each other.

There are not a lot of people in an army who can define the strategy. Within the hierarchy there are levels of strategy but then also: people executing > people thinking.

In the corporate world, this is the other way around. Following the Dilbert principle, organisations are full of people "analyzing" and "researching" without any mandate or power. This results in endless meetings without any purpose. But it sounds acceptable if they call it "strategy".

From my very limited experience, my take away from this post is:

    Extremes are harmful.  Be balanced.

So:

    Right ‘strategy’ in place before doing anything

Is important, but not at the expense of actually executing it and spending all the time on:

    reams and reams of text written...

I agree it is important to have:

    Flexibility to do random things

But not at the cost of completely doing random things without an end goal.

The balance is hard to strike, but is something to strive for!

Post author here. This is very true.

This post was me trying to figure out where the 'right way' to do things lie.

Here's the problem. On one hand, you have the lessons from Google being too random and them winding up at 'more wood, fewer arrows'

On the other hand, I've seen first hand the effects of a bunch of very smart people focused on one strategy - which happens to be the wrong one. If you look at Microsoft in the early 2000s, their strategy around how to deal with the web and recognizing the threat it posed to Windows is out of the book. I've seen some very smart people articulate why it's the right thing to ignore search and ads in 2004/2005. And obviously, it was horribly wrong.

As someone who wants to run a company, I find it fascinating to study how companies deal with these situations and how you can design your culture to avoid it( and without the fix being 'be as talented as Steve Jobs'). I hope the post doesn't come across as bashing MSFT as it isn't about that - MSFT is a good reference model for myself personally since I saw how internal decision making worked there.

In hindsight decisions always horribly wrong/right. But more than always being right, I personally think it's more important to step back and admit that you might actually be wrong and take necessary steps to correct. This summer I was at MSFT as an intern, and I was quite surprised to see some groups which take bold steps despite many criticising them.

Unfortunately, the overlords with all their experience, should know better.

It's good advice but it doesn't address the core problem. The reason "all large companies are in love with finding the right strategy" is because large companies tend to spawn large org charts and the closer people are to the top of that chart the more their job boils down to "build strategy". So not being so f*cking strategic involves far fewer executives.

Meaning while the advice is good it doesn't address the actual problem which is getting those Senior VPs to either (a) eliminate their own jobs or (b) start churning out some code. Neither of which seems likely.

I should also add that do not try to be so f*cking revolutionary. Most products and schemes that aim to be revolutionary seldom end up being that. Apple has been an anomaly.

Edit: I should also add that being inside academia, I have seen some stuff which was said to be revolutionary, and indeed did change a lot of things, but only in the narrow scope of academic research. My comment was about the direct real world impact.

> My comment was about the direct real world impact.

And also about the value of revolution to the first revolutionaries--it's common to see the first movers fall, and later opportunists capitalize on the momentum they started.

Don’t get me wrong. Good strategy combined with good execution is a joy to watch (case in point - Apple over the last decade). The last thing you would want is people off doing their own thing and being all ‘off-strategy’ and rebellious.

I think "strategic" is a little elaborate for Apple's actual plans since Jobs took over. Aside from the initial jump from computers to consumer electronics, the only actual strategic decisions Apple made were along the lines of "what products should we try to create?", "does this product still suck or should we release it soon?", and maybe the switch to Intel processors. They didn't fall into the trap of thinking about second-order shit like image or positioning or market or the economy, they just tried to figure out what would be a great product they could make, and what products and concepts were worth pursuing or not.

Are you forgetting about the decision to create Apple's entire retail division, i.e. the Apple Stores? An idea which people thought was ridiculous at the time?

Or the abandonment of support for clone hardware?

Or the decision to go into the media business by inventing the iTunes store -- but not to rely on media as the primary profit center, but rather as a way of driving sales of extremely profitable hardware?

Or the decision to base iOS on Mac OS X, but not to make them exactly the same thing, with the same apps running on both platforms?

Or the myriads of strategic decisions around the App Store, such as the strict review policy, or the pricing model?

Or even the decision to keep Flash off of iOS, at the possible cost of good relations with Adobe, a company that has traditionally been a bulwark of the Mac OS creative scene?

Or are you trying to deny that these are strategic decisions?

(Note that this is not meant to be an exhaustive list. For example, Tim Cook's list of strategic manufacturing decisions has got to be twice this size, but it's also composed of items that remain secret, or that I don't know about or understand. But why have companies been struggling for years now to match Apple's hardware prices? That's not a fortunate accident.)

I would classify many of those as design decisions. Many of those seem like unavoidable were natural consequences of other decisions, but I agree the distinction isn't clean cut.

One of Tim Cook's strategic manufacturing decisions, as I recall, was to literally corner the market of NAND flash memory since the heyday of the iPod. Apple did and probably still does preorder a commanding proportion of the world's NAND flash production every year. Is that a strategic decision or just the natural consequence of consistently forecasting that you'll need that much NAND flash?

It sounds like I'm minimizing everything by deeming it "not strategic", but if you're going to characterizing the work Apple does, I don't think you'd be that far off characterizing it as intelligent people working out the natural consequences of a very small number of strategic decisions. If you're Apple, and you're going to make a touchscreen phone that doesn't suck, using Mac OS X technology, keeping Flash off, setting up the App Store the way it is are all consequences of that.

In 1996, Apple sold the "Pippin" set-top game system, the Apple Network Server, not to be confused with the Apple Workgroup Server, at least 5 SKUs of Performa, 7 SKUs of Power Macintosh, the Quadra, the QuickTake digital camera, the eMate PDA, and the Color LaserWriter.

These products weren't discontinued because Apple was incapable of executing them. They were discontinued because the strategy of maintaining a one-stop-shop ecosystem, in which a niche of customers would buy not only their computer but also their printer and scanner from Apple, was rejected in favor of the strategy in which the mass market would buy single best-of-breed products from Apple.

Those aren't just two strategies; they're two diametrically opposing strategies.

OK, when two of my favorite HN commentators disagree with something I said it's worth a second thought.

Yes, the strategic shift you point out was immense, but it was also a market shift in response to Apple's products. It wasn't until the iPod took off that Apple's position in the market changed any, they just went from selling 12 poorly differentiated lines of Macs to 4 or 5, but to the same niche. Apple can't strategically will themselves into a mass market, the most they can do is create products that might have a broader appeal than Macs do.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that Jobs forced Apple to focus their product offerings down.

You seem to be saying, "Jobs' Apple didn't so much 'focus' as simply kill bad products".

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle; the strategic shift wasn't so much from complexity to simplicity as it was from niche to mass market. Some things were killed because they were crappy, others because they didn't have mass market appeal (for instance, custom-branded printers and digital cameras).

Apple seems to have been on a trend towards escalating revenue and improving margins long before the iPod was released; see for instance the historical 10Q's on "Wikivest" (whatever that is).

High margins and a mass market strategy tend to be antithetical though.

I think by Apple's standards, anything that doesn't surpass the competition is a crappy product; at the very least it's not a product worth making. Apple had digital cameras and laser printers; what they didn't have was a way to do either product better than everyone else. Focus is certainly part of it, but Apple is less focused now than they were in 1999. Admittedly, compared to any other company, Apple still has extraordinary focus.

It's more my point that it's easy to imagine a world where a minority of Apple fanboys have all the Macs and iPhones and iPads, while Windows and Android rule the mass market. It's execution, not strategy--operational, marketing, retailing, and engineering execution--that makes the difference.

Windows is a high-margin product.

Which imho is a strategy.

Eric Ries might say that all startups are experiments, but when he does so, he's quoting Steve Blank. It's probably nit-picking, but it seems silly to attribute that line of thought to Ries (as much as I respect him as an authority on Lean Startup). The author should give credit where it's due.

Apologies, I actually didn't know that Steve Blank was the source. Will update post.

Strategy should be seen as broad guidelines that help middle management make effective decisions. It is supposed to be a means to reduce communication & decision making overhead. This in turn is supposed to make the large teams more focused & effective.

Strategy is a process to reach the target & not a target/goal in itself. Unfortunately, many senior executives think that strategy is all about the end goal & end up creating wrong strategies. Mostly, the middle management will hear these end goal strategies & have no idea about its usefulness. This defeats the purpose & the middle management ends up wasting more time in meetings & wasting more time instead of being more focused.

To an extent, even Apple practiced the do first, plan later methodology of thinking. They were never planning on going from ipod -> touch screen iphone. As I recall, Steve Jobs has said that he was working on the iPad before the iPhone and thought damn, this would make a hell of a cell phone.

Hell, I don't think a strategy session came up with the app store, It was just a creation that fit the moment.

This used to be Google's approach. Make a shit-ton of things, see which ones caught on, then expand them. 20% time, Google Labs etc were all expressions of this. Which they've been moving away from now - as Larry Page says, they're "putting more wood behind fewer arrows".

Post author here. Google is on the other end of the spectrum ( or used to be). Elsewhere in this thread, someone made a good point of trying to find a balance.

Strategies get bogged down when they try to get to specific (which is to say they stray into tactics that are 4 years out, a definite losing proposition) So you strategy might be 'head west' which works you can evaluate your projects against that, but the strategy 'go to San Diego' would cause a project to heading for the Pacific ocean along the Oregon trail to get cancelled since it was too far north. (when in fact it would help you get to San Diego more easily once you were on the coast)

The concept is exactly similar to significant digits in science, which is to say understand the experiment and the parameters to know who many significant digits you can count on and don't bother with the rest.

Good strategy combined with good execution is a joy to watch (case in point - Apple over the last decade).

I wonder (because I forgot) who did people used to fawn over, or hold up on a pedestal, or revere, or look up to, before Apple came out with the iPod and all this other greatness of the last decade?

Who was doing it well before Apple came along and became the go-to example for everything?

Google. Before them, Amazon. Before them, Microsoft. Before them, IBM.

The industry always wants to emulate the current leader, forgetting that there are a myriad of different strategies available. That's because collectively, given the limited space in news headlines, we're not much smarter than a school of fish. However, individually we can each do better by reading enough history and being focused on and aware of our personal circumstances.

Is that a rhetorical question? I think Bill Gates was certainly one.

Dell and Microsoft, to an extent, but Apple pretty much invented modern lifestyle computing beginning with the first iPod and OSX 10.3 Panther.

I can't help but get a sense that the author is mythologizing and mystifying Apple. Is Apple really that unique?

And this is why I am doing a start up - and praying we are not growing large(?)

Something tells me a whole lot of startups could do with not being so fucking strategic and Just Doing It.

Actually, I think large companies can afford to be far more strategic than your average startup.

Actually, it's the other way around. Strategy isn't some dirty word that people in suits like to toss around - it is just about deciding what you're going to do.

Large companies can afford to dink around with unsuccessful, random projects. Startups have such few resources that you absolutely need to focus and hope you're down the right path. Constantly re-evaluating and 'pivoting' can absolutely be part of your strategy too.

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