part

oneYour strategic self

Strategy is about shaping the future. But even clever planning doesnt always work in the real world. And thats the reason for this book to help you to use strategy to figure out what to do now to get what you really want later. This book can help make strategy work more often.

There are strategy tools and processes that can help, but the real heart of strategy is the strategist. Its what you know, how you think, and how you get people to care enough about what you are doing to achieve your goals.

Its also about setting in motion the sequence of events that will shape the future in a way that you like. The more you understand the people who make events happen and the connections between what they do and those events, the smarter you will be.

You have already used strategy to get a lot of what you have. You got a job. Or you got an education to get a job. You might have saved money for a holiday or a home. Maybe you romanced your partner, wife or husband.

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You did something in the past to try and get something better in the future.

Becoming a strategic thinker a strategist is about getting better at shaping events. In the business world you need to understand how strategy is usually done. You need to know how to create strategy that convinces others to support you (including your boss or shareholders). And you need to know how to make strategy deliver success in the real world. Strategy that works.

There is no guarantee that the future will turn out the way you want. Just writing a plan does not mean that the plan will happen. The world is more complex than our ability to plan, but thats part of what an effective strategist learns to accept. You learn that reacting and responding to events is just as important as planning.

Some business schools and consultancies have sold the promise that strategy can solve everything. In their hands, strategy has become a cult that believes in the magical power of a few models. They have weakened practical emphasis on the art of strategy and left some non-MBAs wondering if there is any room for entrepreneurial instinct.

Others have become cynical about strategy. They hear the word and disengage. They expect bad or boring things to come from any strategic planning process. They predict job cuts or mindless changes. Or just expect meaningless waffle that is incomprehensible in the real world. And there is some truth to this view.

Yet we have been trying to shape our future for as long as we have been human. It is in our nature to interpret our experience to provide shortcuts for a better future. This is what strategy is about and how it can be of value in the real world.

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To become an effective strategist, you need to start with yourself. Begin by understanding how one thing leads to another. Get yourself an education in the basics of strategy tools and models. Pay more attention to where you are, whats happening around you, and how trends create opportunities to get to where you want to be.

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Shaping the future

Strategy is about shaping the future. Corporate strategy is about shaping the future for an organisation. You use strategy to figure out how to achieve your purpose and ambitions. You move between where you want to go (ends) and what you need to do to get there (means). Great strategy is the quickest route from means to ends to shape your future.

Frequency Every problem, every opportunity! Key participants The whole organisation.

Strategy rating Strategy6

The Cheesecake Factory has grown into a billion-dollar corporation. Its recipe for success is based on a small number of strategic ingredients. The founder created a unique concept with the broadest, deepest menu in casual dining and the best cheesecake he could make. They spend $2000 per employee just on training to make sure people deliver the best customer experience.

These are strategic decisions. They are not accidental, although they did not all come from planning. They are part of a strategic package. They shape the competitive environment. They stop copycats. And they shape the future in ways that are desirable and believable to investors, managers and employees.

Objective

Shaping the future of an organisation involves every part and everyone. Strategy considers things inside and outside the organisation that will make a difference to its success. The strat-egist also looks for opportunities and threats to the future of the organisation. Ideally these are explored with imagination, ambition and a creative understanding of customers, products and resources.

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5Shaping the future

To shape the future requires a combination of thinking, planning and reacting to events that emerge along the way. These provide key strategy questions:

What do we want to do?

What do we think is possible?

What do we need to do to achieve our goals?

When should we react to new opportunities and adapt plans?

What do we want to do? This establishes a sense of what is desirable. Organisations tend to have an overall purpose. Sometimes purpose is very precise and deliberately agreed; sometimes the purpose of the organi-sation is very ambiguous. There may be many different opinions about what the organisation is for and what it should do. These opinions may conflict and compete with each other. This is all of interest to the strategic thinker.

What do we think is possible? This introduces some sense of practicality. You look at oppor-tunities in the world contrasted with the resources that the organisation either has or can obtain. But looking at opportu-nities can also expand a sense of what is possible beyond what has been done in the past. What do the achievements of others and trends in technology and consumer desires allow your company to do next?

What do we need to do to achieve our goals? This includes the necessary strategic moves to achieve the overall goals of the organisation. It includes the style of leadership as well as the structures and processes of the organisation, and the projects, tasks, roles, products and services that have to be done to achieve organisational aspirations. Ideally these actions work together in some more or less harmonious way so that the sum of actions is greater than their parts.

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Your strategic self6

When should we react to new opportunities and adapt plans? Our views of the future are incomplete. When we write our plans or decide on an overall purpose we dont really know what is going to happen next. Small and big events will happen that challenge the existing strategy. New opportunities will emerge that are bigger, better or just different from those we thought of the first time.

Context

Shaping the future depends on context. You cant control the waves of human desire and endeavour with strategy, but you can create strategy that surfs those human waves, contributing to them or benefiting from them. It follows that you need to under-stand the context for any attempt to create strategy.

There are probably some low competition, high stability markets but it is safer to assume your strategy will face high competition, low stability. So this book will make the same assumption and give advice on strategy that can be effective in such a situation.

Each section answers questions that are needed to create a strategy that can be used to shape the future. There are sections that explain how to create strategy, think like a strategist, win with strategy, make your strategy work, build a strategic organisation and troubleshoot your strategy whenever it stops working.

Challenge

A lot of organisations still set in motion grand plans to a better future. The larger the organisation, even now, the more likely it is that they have a strategic planning team who produce strategy documents as a result of lengthy financial analysis.

This plan is then cascaded or passed down the hierarchy until it reaches middle management, at which point it often disap-pears. The front line may have to work in structures, processes or role descriptions that were designed as part of the plan. This

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7Shaping the future

planning, command and control approach often leads to out-of-date strategy and out-of-touch leaders.

Some people argue it isnt even possible to plan because events are so unpredictable. They claim it is better just to organise as efficiently as possible. Then you just hope evolutionary market forces (what people want and what people sell) will be a natural fit to whatever you are doing.

The trouble with this evolutionary approach is that it doesnt really address what you need to try and do to make it more likely that your company is a natural fit. And thats why clever strategy is somewhere between the extremes. It does try to plan deliberate actions to shape the future, but it also tries to stay close to local events and to react to them. In this way, strategy is transformed into a learning process that becomes at its best smarter through experimentation.

Success

Progress is made when the organisation moves towards a strategy that learns its lessons and adapts to new opportunities. In this way, you can benefit from strategic thinking that is clever rather than one-size-fits-all strategy. You will also see people at all levels more involved because managers are interested in what is really happening at the front line.

Your strategy efforts will use strategic principles and tools to better prepare the organisation for shaping the future. Your strategy will craft a response to external waves, needs of customers and actions of competitors. Your strategy will consider the nature of the business (its purpose, style and products) and the ways that it organises internal resources, processes and people.

Strategists measures of success

Understand (and apply) the main strategy questions.

Use the differences between planning, coping, adapting and shaping covered throughout this book.

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Your strategic self8

Pitfalls

Its important that efforts to introduce more strategy dont lead to less strategic thinking (or worse results). There are lots of naturally strategic people who see opportunities, see new patterns and adjust the work of the organisation to take advantage of these. Its also important not to simply replace one set of words with another. The idea of strategic thinking is to improve results.

Strategists checklist

Remember that inward-looking planning is not sufficient because of the high levels of external change and competition.

Work your way through the strategy questions (see page 167) and answer them for your business. It provides a valuable template for developing creative strategy that is straight-forward enough for all sizes of business.

Understand the importance of a learning approach to strategy. This means that as many people as possible are engaged with strategy so that they can adapt what they do to support the purpose of the organisation. And so that they can feed back valuable information to their leadership team in order to adapt the official strategy.

Related ideas

Howard Thomas and Taieb Hafsi offer a useful (although academic) way of looking at what strategy is and whether it matters. For them, strategy is a mixture of rules of thumb and creative methods. It helps people understand and transform reality. This means that strategy tools are only valuable if they

Consider a wide range of internal and external aspects.

Accept the need to build a strategic organisation to achieve shared purpose.

Establish a flexible, continuous approach to strategy.

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9Shaping the future

stay close to reality. Some techniques are useful only for making specific decisions. The most powerful tools will help people navigate the process of shaping the future. Without this, strategy is nothing.

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