TBM 275: "Bad" Strategy. Why?
I often speak to people who lament the fact that their company strategy doesn’t match the "good strategy" descriptions discussed in books, talks, research, and popular examples. “With so much information out there, why don’t we have a real strategy?” The delta between what they believe is possible and what exists at their company is wide.
Here are some things to consider.
A company does not have a strategy. The individuals in a company have strategies. Individuals may be better/worse at persuading others to adopt their strategy—or merge and adapt strategies—but there is no single strategy.
What you are seeing communicated across the company is not the actual strategy. You are seeing a negotiated narrative, and there's a good chance you're not privy to all the information and context underpinning those implicit and explicit negotiations.
To continue that thought, the strategy itself is a negotiation. This may seem heretical (especially to strategy nerds). Shouldn't we pursue the objectively right strategy? Realistically, the objectively and theoretically right strategy may clash too heavily with the status quo. Strategic shifts have winners and losers, right and wrongs, threats, and promotions. "Right for who?" is a critical question. What is right for an upstart designer in the first couple years of their career may not be the same as what is right for the CFO. This is why it can be much easier to pay an outside firm to tell you the strategy. It makes it easier to accept.
For some groups of people in the company, the risks involved with an opinionated strategy—edgy, crux-focused, long-term—are unsatisfactory and not worth the effort. It doesn't meet their needs. Probabilistically, the neutral 6 out of 10 option is perfectly fine. Strategy, as many people picture it, has a long-term component. Not everyone is going to stick around for the long term.
The thought process was not put in writing or communicated. The real strategy sits in people's brains (continuous and unconscious) and is converted to a plan, pillars, or targets/goals. People sometimes ask themselves, "What's going on, and what's the problem?" and generate a plan. Strategy happened—you weren't in their head. The same probably happens to you often. Many of the most effective strategists I've encountered are more intuitive, naturalistic internal strategizers. They don't care much about talking about it.
The big bet has been played, and you must go through the motions. This can be hard to grasp, but people tend to over-index the immediate options and decisions. It is considered a bad strategy when the strategy fails to inform those decisions (or over-prescribes solutions to those issues). But when you step back, you'll often find that the key strategic "move" has been in motion for many years, has been funded, and is playing its course. When we consider that companies themselves are strategic bets in investment portfolios, we start to see that when you step back, many of the details you see (and stress about) as an IC or front-line manager are relatively unimportant.
Many of the great strategies we hear about are post-facto rationalizations of emergent, very non-strategic-looking activities at the time. Authors try to capture that emergent soup, and people who were there may imagine it to be more structured in retrospect. But many famous companies tried things, stumbled into something that worked, mixed that with some luck, and doubled down.
Things are working too well to inspire a strategy. While the lack of a real strategy may make your role difficult, it helps to keep in mind all the positive things happening. Is there a catalyst to "Be Bold!" right now? For you, the ramifications are serious. Overall, there's a ton of inertia.
So what can you do?
Focus on the decisions you must make and either advance a strategy or ask for context that might inform your strategy. There are many reasons why your company's strategy might not meet your needs, but you'll have to make progress and practice your craft somehow.
It's a bit present in all your points, but strategy is one aspect why I often prefer to compare a company to a caravan rather than a boat. A caravan can split, goes in different directions, disassemble and reassemble later, etc. It could be to scout a new path or to make a detour to get some water for the rest of the group. Some can homestead at some points, to exploit a small lot, while others continue. Seeing a company as a boat going in one direction indicated by one captain feels a lot like a surreal utopia in this sense.
+1 for the preeminence of intuitive strategic thinking. It’s often maligned because an intuitive early in their career must make bad decisions to learn how to make good ones. (I know I did!) Gladwell’s “Blink” is one that resonated deeply in my neurodivergent brain.
Nit: I don’t often see “negotiated” so much as “competed” or “fought” or “defended” or “imposed” in the places I’ve been. I see strategies like frames of reference (as described by Klaff in “Pitch Anything”) with the strongest frame/strategy winning. By winning, I mean in the sense that the market is never wrong. Strategy can’t be separated from its conscious and unconscious components any more than it can from its intended and unintended components (money/time invested versus luck/timing). The “best” strategy always wins. But beware the fool who tries to copy someone else’s “best practices” without copying the exact circumstances in which they were best. 😏 Better to look for principles upon which to make intentional trade offs.