My motto is, “If you don’t make a difference, you don’t matter.”
Business competitiveness is all about making a difference. So key questions in strategy are: “What is our difference?” “Why does it matter?” and “How will we deliver?”
Any firm wanting to be successful has to be able to do some thing exceptionally well. Innovation, for example. Or operating across borders. Or recruiting and managing people with rare skills. Or developing alliances, design, manufacturing, marketing, service—or any of the many other activities that add up to the production of value.
That thing must set the firm apart from competitors and offer unique value to customers especially, but also to various other stakeholders. It must be durable and defendable. And most importantly, it must have “multiplier potential” so that excelling in it today will enable delivery of further value in the future.
Experts on business have been telling us this for ages, using terms like “core competence” or “core capabilities.” Most executives understand it well and will swear they’re driven by it—though in most companies there’s a surprising lack of focus on actually making a difference. Rather, it’s one of those taken-for-granted notions that hovers in the background but is not the central and explicit issue in every conversation or decision. I’ve sat in countless management discussions where no one mentions it at all.
What’s even more of a surprise is that strategy itself isn’t seen as a capability worthy of special focus or mastery. Almost everyone agrees it’s important and knows you have to have one, so you have to “do it.” But get it out of the way, and you can get on with making and selling stuff and making a profit.
Why do I say this? Here are some reasons, gleaned from my own 25-plus years of consulting as well as lots of research by others:
1. Just about every manager you talk to in any company—let alone across firms—has a different take on what strategy is about. They’re all over the place when it comes to why it matters, what it should do, or how to make and execute it. They’ve all read strategy books and attended courses, but they’re unclear about why one approach to strategy works while another is less satisfactory. So ask six senior people about this and you’ll likely get six different opinions. Ask the same questions outside the C-suite, and you can expect blank looks.
2. Few companies have a consistent approach to strategy. They bounce from this concept to that, switching tools and techniques on a whim. They don’t have a “strategy language” that their people understand and that anchors their discussions. As a result, their strategic conversations are poorly framed and conducting them over time is ineffective. A process that should cut through complexity, clarify priorities, and focus resources and efforts has the unintended consequence of constantly adding confusion.
3. They chop and change consultants as if whom they work with doesn’t matter. (Why don’t they do the same with their auditors or lawyers?) They think that outsiders can add value to a strategy process, but are careless about choosing them, often leaving it to some low-level, uninformed person to call around or do a Google search for someone new. They’re not fussy about whether the latest “guru” is really a strategy expert—or a sales trainer or retired factory manager hungry for a new assignment. So the value of the advice they get is spotty, and they’re jerked this way and that by it.
4. They fail to look back and learn, and to use each strategy discussion as a building block for the next one. Amazingly, there’s evidence that only a few firms systematically review their strategies or keep building on them. They make one, get on with life… make a new one… get on with life… and so on. Equally amazing, they rarely review their approach to strategy, asking whether it’s the best they can do or needs to be changed, or debating how to improve it.
5. Strategy is seen as a parallel activity to “real work,” not as real work. And certainly not as the most important of all real work. It’s not woven into the everyday agenda. It isn’t seen as the over-arching issue in business, or as something that concerns literally every person in an organization. It’s a task that has to be dealt with. It gets the spotlight from time to time, and then only a privileged few people get involved with it.
Competing in the future will be quite unlike competing in the past. Things will be much, much tougher. Firms will have to be cleverer and quicker in dealing with the challenges they’ll face. Making strategy “on the fly” will be increasingly necessary. Strategy smarts will matter more and more.
So if there’s one deep competence companies need to develop, strategy is it. The ability to craft and conduct strategic conversation —to design and execute effective strategy—will be the skill that “makes the difference that matters.”
Nothing else—not financial wizardry, innovation, collaboration, “human capital” management, technology, or whatever—counts as much. For without strategy, nothing else will get companies the results they want. And the difference between good strategy and bad strategy will count as never before.
MAKING STRATEGY MATTER
- Make building the strongest possible strategy capability an explicit goal and a priority—”Topic #1″ in your company. And involve everyone.
- Taking into account your specific needs, choose one approach to strategy and stick to it. Communicate it widely and constantly within your organisation.
- Use a few tools and learn to use them well. Keep checking that they’re working for you (but beware of dumping them too readily).
- Develop a “strategy language” so people talk about things the same way.
- If you need help, pick your advisors carefully. Make it clear to them that while you want their outsider’s views and expert knowledge, you aim to develop a consistent process and to develop the strategic IQ of your team. Make sure that what they’ll bring to the party will be additive and not blow holes in your approach or take you in a totally different direction.
- Constantly review with your team what new knowledge and insights about strategy they may have picked up, and rigorously debate whether or not to integrate them into your approach. If you really think they have merit, plug them in carefully.
- Always review your current strategy before moving on. It’s tempting to race forward, especially when you face new challenges, but that can hurt programmes and initiatives already in place.
- Practice! Practice! Practice! Create opportunities to talk strategy. Begin every strategy discussion with the intention that it will be a building block for the next one. Keep asking, “Why is this working for us?” “How can we do it better?”
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