Solutions
Most companies equate strategy with hitting financial goals but they underestimate the process and the value of the “real thing”.
The word “strategy” means an approach to dealing with a difficult challenge, especially that of competing with a clever opponent.
To have a strategy is to have an approach to overcoming critical obstacles and difficulties. Too much corporate work on strategy has devolved into setting financial-performance goals rather than developing solutions to important and often imminent difficulties. Is it any surprise that most senior executives are disappointed with the outcomes of their strategy process? Strategic planning is vital but without proper implementation it will not be successful.
WHY STRATEGY IS HARD:
Real strategy work is hard. It is hard because serious strategy situations are much more complex than decision situations. Those situations do not present easy-to-identify answers; they don’t even present readily identifiable choices. Rather, they present multiple issues where the underlying forces and logic at work are not immediately obvious. The skilled strategist recognizes the heart of a challenge as the thing blocking an easy solution. Attention is drawn to it because it hints at leverage.
THE FORCE OF COHERENCE:
The most ancient and still crucial element of strategy is focus. Strategic focus means bringing sources of power to bear on a selected target. If the power is weak, nothing happens. If it is strong but scattered and diffused across targets, nothing good happens. If power is focused on the wrong target, nothing good happens. But when power is focused on the right target, breakthroughs occur.
FACING THE FACTS
A strategy is a way to overcome selected difficulties. It is not a wish list of wonderful possible outcomes.
The art of strategy is not the art of decision making—that discipline assumes that you have been handed a list of possible actions to choose among. The art of strategy is also not the process of finding your one true goal and passionately pursuing it with all your heart and soul in everything you do—that is what some call monomania. Nor is the art of strategy the act of setting higher and higher performance goals for people and using charisma, carrots, and sticks to push them to attain those goals—that presumes that someone somewhere knows how to find a way through the thicket of problems the organization actually faces.
To create a strategy, one needs to embrace the full complex and confusing force of the challenges and opportunities being faced.
To create a strategy, one has to develop a sense for the crux of the problem—the place where a commitment to action will have the best chance of surmounting the most critical obstacles.
To create a strategy, one needs to be persistent and avoid the temptation to grab the first glimmer of a pathway through the thicket of issues.
To create a strategy, one must balance a host of issues with its bundle of accompanying ambitions—the purposes, values, and beliefs that stakeholders wish to support.
To create a strategy, one must keep actions and policies coherent and aligned, instead of nullifying efforts by pursuing too many different initiatives or conflicting purposes.
