Strategy sessions are often seen as an annual, 3 day bonding session at a nice spot away from the usual distractions, with little application to the daily business.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Strategy is not just about the long term.
A robust and effective strategy is cascaded into a series of increasingly detailed plans with actions and accountabilities attached. A ‘waffly’ strategy stuck on the foyer wall will do nothing, but a strategy that works will not just drive everything down to the daily level, it will perhaps more importantly, tell everyone why they are doing the things they are doing, and what their role is in delivering success. This contributes to a culture of collaboration and performance.
Sustainable competitive advantage is a dead idea.
Nonsense! Identifying your competitive advantage and doubling down on it is more important than ever, simply because the pace of competition is so much quicker, and your actions are transparent to those who choose to watch. This makes it critical that you have an advantage, but that you also continue to enable its evolution at a pace quicker than the competition. The key is the cycle time of innovation in the orbit of your competitive advantage.
Agility trumps strategy.
Strategic clarity enables quick decisions about where, when and how to be agile. Agility by itself may look nice, but is useless unless used to deliver value. Strategy is all about delivering long term value, being agile is a component of a robust strategy. It is a capability that enables you to move quickly within the established strategic framework towards an explicit goal.
A Digital strategy is essential.
Digital capability is increasingly critical to commercial success, but digital capability is not a strategy, it is a contributing factor to a sustainable strategy. Do you have a telephone strategy? Business would not be able to be done without a phone, how about an electricity strategy? No? you may have a renewable energy component in your strategy because energy costs are important, and managing the technology a make or break capability, but in itself is a part of the larger strategy.
Strategy cannot accommodate disruption.
Disruption has become almost a cliché, an excuse for just about every failure around. Strategy is all about building a framework that will enable sustainable commercial success, and if that is not about anticipating and leveraging disruption, amongst the other factors that drive long term success, I am not sure what is. The challenge is that disruption has suddenly emerged as the executioners block for those who fail to change at the radically increased rate over that required just a generation ago. Pick any disruption you like, and you will see elements of it that were both predictable and within the capability of the legacy businesses to leverage, if they had the foresight and capability to disrupt themselves. Being the big incumbents, arguably they are the best resourced to be the disruptors, but almost never do so. The bigger the ship, the harder it is to change direction. It is not disruption that leads to failure, but the strategic failure to anticipate, lead, and leverage the disruption that leads to the failure.
My antidote to all this is to be continuously discussing and refreshing strategy by having it on the agenda at all times. Ditch the notion that it is set in an annual 3 day gabfest, and make strategic thinking a crucial part of your standard operating procedures throughout the enterprise. Strategic thinking should be on every agenda in an enterprise, and a general responsibility, not one reserved for the few senior managers.
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