Are you a Björn Borg person, or a John McEnroe person?

Back in the mists of time when I was young, an intense rivalry played out in the tennis world, between Björn Borg and John McEnroe. Even though I recognized McEnroe’s brilliance, I was always a Borg guy. Now I am no tennis expert, and I may have interpreted their rivalry a bit wrong, but in my head Borg was a natural. Elegant, mercurial, cool. McEnroe was defined by the word ‘hustle’. He never gave up on a point, push hard, trained hard, got angry and used that anger on court. Similarly, in the world of chess, I was first drawn to the romantic story of Bobby Fischer taking on the Soviet chess machine, but in the end was most entranced by the Cuban prodigy José Raúl Capablanca, for similar reasons. I thought about it a lot. Why did I like the idea of ‘naturals’. Surely it is more impressive for someone who is not born with a gift to develop those skills? I realized that what I was longing for was a bit of magic. Someone to rise above the ‘tyranny of transactionality’. In the business world, I feel like I have grown up in an era where strategy has become weak and discredited as a discipline, and the tyranny of execution dominates the day. The prevalent sentiment seems to be ‘ideas are ten a penny’, what really matters is execution. I would like to argue that leaders who think this way in both business and government are why the world is in a bit of a mess at the moment. I was with my friend and colleague Jonathan Krause yesterday, and he reminded me of an anecdote I used a lot ten years ago with clients: A policeman walking the streets at night comes across a man crawling around underneath a lamppost. “What are you doing sir?” “I am looking for my keys” “Did you drop them here?” “No, I dropped them down that dark alley.” “Then why are you looking for them here?” “Because it’s light here”. It’s time for governments and businesses to get up off their knees and shine a light on strategy. #unthink #unask #unlearn #strategy