There are four fundamental attitudes to strategy

I have the great opportunity to talk to hundreds of companies and leaders every year about strategy, including reviewing business strategies, digital strategies, IT strategies and of course now AI strategies.  Each organization I work with seems to have one of four fundamental attitudes to the discipline of strategy itself: 1. Strategy as frippery. “Strategy is just a fancy word that expensive management consultants use. We don’t need it. It doesn’t help.” This tends to lead to a very operationally skilled, highly reactive organization. When I worked in banking IT in the 1990s, it was like this. This isn’t sustainable, even if there is no change going on. The people and the business burn out. 2. Strategy as planning. “We don’t need high-falutin’ mission and vision statements. We just need to plan the work, then work the plan.” This may manifest as addiction to a particular methodology like Lean, Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, etc. This approach can survive as long as there is no change in the market. Limited innovation. Somehow this approach is well represented by the William Blake picture “Newton: Personification of Man Limited By Reason”. (A Paolozzi statue based on this picture stands outside the British Library, about 15 mins from my house.) 3. Strategy as tactics. “We need to be clear about our competitive advantage and push it. We don’t need to look beyond that.” This tends to a focus on current competition. Current ways to win. Current customer needs and tastes. This approach is sustainable as long as there isn’t radical disruption, substitute products/ industries, new platforms and ecosystems etc. 4. Strategy as disruption. “We focus on the future. We are more likely to disrupt than get disrupted.” This is an exciting place to be. The discipline of antifragility helps here. The only danger is spending too much energy on this for too long, as companies and markets mature. I have presented the above as four distinct choices. Of course every organization needs a balance of 2, 3 and 4. (And hopefully none of 1.) The balance depends on a lot of things, including function, company, market and macro conditions. And those all change over time. Almost without exception, I feel like the balance is too much on the lower numbers. I might imagine a good rule-of-thumb for a middle of the road company should be something like 40-50% planning, 20-30% strategizing, 10-20% disruption, in terms of strategic work. What is the balance of your function, your business unit, your company’s attitudes to strategy? #unask #unthink #unlearn #strategy. #planning