Strategy is a bit like economics, go to 5 so called strategists, and you will get 6 opinions.
This is terminally annoying to our accounting and engineering friends who thrive on certainty. However, it is perfectly OK, as we are dealing with the future, and that rarely turns out to be what we think it should be.
The challenge is a Bayesian one.
Over time becoming incrementally less wrong.
Good strategy enables the pace of that Bayesian improvement to be accelerated, sometimes by a geometric proportion.
Strategy generation is a process, it is about creating the future. It has not happened yet, so cannot be ‘proved’ in any definitive manner, until you have the outcomes to count. By that time, it is too late to do anything but adjust and learn for the next time. This does not imply wholesale change, which only emerges from poor strategy in the first place. By contrast, good strategy enables subtle adjustments to be made over time while the direction holds firm.
This makes strategy generation a series of choices powered by an assessment of the relative odds of varying outcomes emerging.
Over the years I have whinged about the mediocre quality of many marketing people I have come across, intellectual dwarfs that fall into ‘marketing’ because they failed to make the grade at something useful.
It is ironic then that almost without exception, the best marketers I have worked with, and for, have found themselves in marketing after becoming tired of the restrictions placed on more externally disciplined professions: accountants (which is where I originated) lawyers, scientists, and medicine.
The combination of the automatic discipline of the scientific method with the creative thinking based on quality data required in marketing and strategy is a potent combination indeed.
Header cartoon: courtesy, again, of Dilbert and his mate Scott Adams.
Allen, I should reply more often in response to your articles. I save every newsletter you have sent me and I often read them when I’m on a flight going somewhere in the US or when I want to take 10 minutes to read knowing I will be challenged. I can’t think of many articles you have written where I didn’t learn something and often it revealed a blind spot of my own. Thank you for the difference you make in my life. I am grateful.
Wow, thanks Jeff,
Now I am just humbled!
Allen, wow! I am saving this article to re-read and remind myself of what you said so well:
“Strategy generation is a process, it is about creating the future. It has not happened yet, so cannot be ‘proved’ in any definitive manner, until you have the outcomes to count. By that time, it is too late to do anything but adjust and learn for the next time. This does not imply wholesale change, which only emerges from poor strategy in the first place. By contrast, good strategy enables subtle adjustments to be made over time while the direction holds firm.”
Also, summarized so well on your home page — Sustainable Performance Improvement.
I love it! Thank you.
Jeff, Thanks for the kind wiords, and I am enormously gratified that that my musings are of value to you.
Thanks for letting me know, it is not often that someone takes the time to do so.
Best wishes
Allen