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Strategy reset: what it means, why it matters and why you should about it right now

One question I’m constantly asked, by both consulting clients and business school classes, is, “When should you review and possibly change your strategy?”

A second question—one that’s almost never asked—is just as important: When should you rethink the way you make strategy?

The answer to both questions, as with most others in management, is “It depends.”

There is never a “right” time to take a fresh look at your strategy. After all, strategy is a dynamic activity. You may create it at a specific moment, but you execute it over weeks, months or years—and meanwhile, things change constantly both inside and outside your organization.

Let’s say you develop a five-year plan. Let’s say, too, that you’ve laid out in great detail what you expect to happen in your world from year to year, what you must do, and what results you will get. You bind that story into a thick document, and start moving.

In no time at all, though, the assumptions you made about the future turn out to be wrong. You try to execute your plan as well as possible, but the world you designed it for is not the world you find yourself in. There are many surprises. Things don’t go as smoothly as you’d like. Problems distract you. New challenges engulf you.

Politicians fighting for voters seem intent on making life tough for business. The economy  grows and slows. Regulators keep you on your toes with a string of new laws and adjustments to old ones. Machines fail. People present you with a constant flow of problems. Suppliers let you down. Competitors surprise you. Customers change their spending habits. And so on.

The result is, you spend more time fighting fires than thinking about the future. You miss some of your targets. And you realize that that you’re doing a lot of things that no longer make sense.

There’s no point in persisting with a strategy that’s out of kilter with the world. So you need to rethink what you’re doing. But it’s not enough to do it at long intervals, or as a one-off response to factors that have popped up on your radar screen.

NEW REALITIES DEMAND A NEW STRATEGIC CONVERSATION

If 2011 was a year of astonishing tumult and upheaval, 2012 is bringing even more of it. “The new normal” is defined by austerity, volatility, and surprise, and much of the world will struggle for years through “The Great Contraction.” At the same time, we face rapid and radical shifts in politics, society, the environment, regulation, and technology—and in customer and competitor behavior.

Today, virtually every market—for any product or service—is an emerging market demanding fresh insights and ideas.

To survive and thrive in this new era, companies need to take a new look at the purpose and role of business, what “value creation” means—and which stakeholders really matter. They need to out-learn and out-run the competition. They need to understand the “rules of their game” and excel at them, while simultaneously making innovation a way of life. And they need to balance long-term capability building with short term action.

Strategic thinking is a living process. Strategy is a here-and-now view of where and how you’ll compete, which will almost inevitably have to change faster than you might imagine. So you need to review it constantly, to be sure you’re dealing in the best possible way with emerging conditions.

But it’s not enough just to re-look at the assumptions you made and the decisions and choices that followed. The content of your strategy is obviously important. But equally important—and largely overlooked—is the way you got to it. In other words, the way you think about strategy.

Right now, job #1 for most executives is not only to reset their strategies, but also to rethink what strategy should do for them and how they use it. That’s job #1 for me too!

 This is no time for business as usual. Neither can you risk strategy as usual.

 
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What your company must excel at

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
  1. Make building the strongest possible strategy capability an explicit goal and a priority—”Topic #1″ in your company. And involve everyone.
  2. Taking into account your specific needs, choose one approach to strategy and stick to it. Communicate it widely and constantly within your organisation. 
  3. 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). 
  4. Develop a “strategy language” so people talk about things the same way. 
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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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When managers doubt strategy

Strategic planning has a long history—and a dismal track record. Just about every company does it, obviously because they think it’s important, yet it’s value is highly questionable.

Ask almost any senior manager, “Is planning important to your company?” and you’ll get a strange look and a resounding “Yes.” But ask, “What exactly does it do for you?” and the answer is likely to be vague and unconvincing. Even when you do get a confident story, it’s easy to poke holes in it. There’s almost always a gap between intentions, expectations, and results.

In many firms strategy is reduced to an annual ritual tied to the budget cycle rather than timed to deal with critical challenges. It’s a stop-start activity that distracts people from “real work,” incites political games, and results in boring PowerPoint presentations and piles of paper which no one looks at again. While it’s happening, new challenges keep arising and decisions are made that override what was decided the year before. When it’s done, there’s a huge sigh of relief.

What should be a very serious matter is a recurring joke. “The Stratplan” is a calendar event more notable for what goes into it than what comes out of it. The best that can be said of it is that it keeps a lot of people busy while life goes on.

In consulting assignments and business school classes, I typically get questions like these:

  1. Does planning work?
  2. What’s the best process?
  3. Who should be involved?
  4. How can you communicate the plan throughout an organization?
  5. How long should a plan last, and when should you change it?
  6. How can you improve execution?
  7. How can a balance be struck between planning and innovation?
  8. What’s the best way to measure strategy?

This used to surprise me. After all, “everyone knows” that strategy is the overarching management discipline, the one that comes before all other and informs every management decision and action.

It’s a topic that has been researched and commented on for decades by academics, business leaders and journalists. There are countless books, articles and courses on it, and more than enough models, frameworks and opinions to provide the guidance any manager could want.

But having watched countless high-level executives struggle to make sense of strategy, I’ve come to the view that in their quest for better tools and techniques they have utterly confused themselves and everyone around them. Equally serious, their ceaseless experimentation keeps them from ever mastering and embedding any single approach that will serve them over time.

The questions above are not profound ones: they deal with what you might at best call “the basics.” So surely the answers should be well known to anyone with even limited exposure to strategy theory and a modicum of experience in making and executing strategy. But clearly they’re not. This very important—and very influential—subject is shrouded in mystery and mumbo-jumbo.

To develop strategy, managers tend to use an arbitrary mix of familiar tools and fashionable new ideas. SWOT analysis seems mandatory and Porter’s five forces framework is popular. During the past three decades, the vision, mission, values approach has gained a strong hold. Terms like core competence, agility, strategy maps, and balanced scorecards are tossed about.

In the introduction to Competence-Based Competition, a 1994 book they edited for the Strategic Management Society, Gary Hamel and Aimé Heene said this:

“After almost 40 years of development and theory building, the field of strategic management is today, more than ever, characterized by contrasting and sometimes competing paradigms … the strategy field seems to be as far away as ever from a ‘grand unified theory’ of competitiveness. Indeed, there is still much divergence of opinion within the strategy field on questions as basic as ‘what is a theory of strategic management about?’ and, more importantly, ‘what should a theory of strategic management be about?’”

A few years later, Hamel, one of the most prominent strategy gurus of all, wrote in the Financial Times that “The dirty little secret is that we don’t have a theory of strategy creation. We don’t know how it’s done.”

I disagree with both these comments. Hamel and Heene are right to say that there are many opinions about strategy theory, but there are not many strategy theories. In fact, there are just a few—and they underpin all the other stuff that “thought leaders” spin as breakthrough ideas. The real “dirty little secret” about strategy creation is we know more than enough about it but just don’t do it very well!

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Winning in emerging markets

When developed economies slumped as a result of the financial meltdown which began in 2007, companies everywhere scrambled frantically to find new markets for their goods and services. Overnight, “emerging” markets (developing nations) became everyone’s target.

By the time of the crash, it was already clear that a massive economic shift was under way from the West to the East, and that future global growth would come more from developing nations rather than the established powerhouses: the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

From the earliest days of global trade, the lure of foreign customers in strange places has been a strong one. Following World War II, innovative technologies and logistics systems, the spread of democracy, and the increasing wealth of billions of the world’s citizens have led to fabulous opportunities for companies selling everything from cement to soap, from food to financial services. But it’s really only been in the past 30-odd years that emerging market mania has taken hold.

Ted Levitt at Harvard Business School alerted companies in 1983 to “The globalization of markets,” and the opportunities in marketing across borders. Jim O’Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs coined the catchy terms “BRICs” (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and “the next 11” (Mexico, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, South Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam). C.K. Prahalad wrote about “the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.” New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s books, The Lexus and The Olive Tree (1999) and The World is Flat (2005), were best-sellers. Many other observers spewed out analyses, reports, articles, and books on the same topic. And it gets hyped to the hilt at the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos get-together.

Growth in rich countries remains sluggish. All evidence suggests that developing countries are where companies will find the sales they need. So competition there will become increasingly hostile, and the demand for fresh thinking on it will rise fast.

But there are some realities that cannot be ignored.

A LITTLE THEORY GOES A LONG WAY

Interest in emerging markets has brought with it an outpouring of views on the attractions of specific countries and what it takes to succeed in them. Usually, these are couched in stirring tales of how this or that entrepreneur beat the odds to make a fortune in some poverty-stricken place; how companies from India, Mexico, or South Africa became admired multinationals; and how firms in rich countries found opportunities in poor ones. Much of what’s on offer is entertaining and even inspiring, but contributes little to a theory of emerging market strategy.

The need for advice on how to crack emerging markets is a big one, and its growth is explosive. So we shouldn’t be surprised if zealous researchers and managers underplay what is already known, and what expansionary firms have learned over many decades—even centuries. Breakthroughs are always more seductive than “the basics.”

A few experts have provided useful insights about emerging market strategy. But by and large, efforts to produce useful concepts or tools specific to this field have been less than fruitful, and will continue to disappoint.

As with other areas of management, there’s only so much that can be said. There will be some incremental advances, but executives should not expect revolutionary new models or frameworks. Those in the advice business will add most value by providing information about particular countries and sectors (context), and what it takes to win in them, rather than about strategy itself (concepts).

THE GLOBALIZATION OF … MANAGEMENT

As I pointed out in a previous post, virtually every market for everything is today an emerging market, in the sense that conditions are in flux, the future is unclear, competitive intensity is high, and the rules of the game are evolving. Strategies and business models that once worked well can quickly become recipes for failure, so both must be adjusted or maybe reinvented to meet new circumstances.

But it also means that whether you’re doing business in Europe or the U.S., or trying to get moving in Malawi or Myanmar, many of the challenges are fundamentally alike. And solutions to them will be much the same, too.

The principles of management that produce results are similar across industries. They’re also similar across countries. It may be fashionable to suggest otherwise, but the evidence is clear.

Management know-how has not only been commoditized, it has also been globalized. So instead of wasting time trying to reinvent this wheel, you can focus on the really hard work of getting to know the market you’re aiming at, and figuring out how to apply the best practices within it.

CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING

The first and most important question every firm must answer when it ventures into new territory is, How will we fit in? This is the make-or-break issue. Deep local knowledge makes all the difference. Personal relationships count for a lot. Most executives who’ve worked in developing markets talk about their steep learning curve, the time it took to gain traction there.

Wherever in the world you do business, you have to be wise to politics, culture, and economics; to the structure and character of whatever market you’re in; to customer expectations and behaviour; and to what competitors are doing. But in developing countries, three issues demand particular attention.

First, there’s the fact that “things don’t work”—or at least not as they do in developed nations. Companies are dogged by what Tarun Khanna and Krishna G. Palepu have termed “institutional voids”: poor infrastructure, dodgy regulation, weak capital markets, lousy services, a lack of skills, and much else. Unhelpful bureaucrats make things worse. Corruption may be a huge problem (although it also occurs in even the most advanced nations). Protecting intellectual property can be a nightmare.

Second, is the difficulty in connecting sellers and buyers. Informal trade is probably the norm; business ecosystems are ill-formed. There’s little information about customers or competitors. Promotions, logistics, and support all present hurdles.

Third, is the management of people. Individuals with appropriate capabilities and experience are in short supply. Productivity, quality, and customer service are not their priorities. They’re unfamiliar with sophisticated working methods. They have to be introduced to a host of new ideas—roles and responsibilities, technical systems, performance management, communication, disciplinary processes, and so on. So foreign executives need to be firm and persistent in providing new direction, while at the same time acutely conscious of local custom.

None of this should be under-estimated. No one should imagine that building a business in a developing country is a cake-walk. It’s folly to believe you can simply charge out of New York and set up shop in New Delhi.

Joburg and Lagos may both be in Africa, but South African managers who think they can easily crack the Nigerian market because “We are African, we understand Africa,” are in for a shock. Success in one country in Africa, Asia, or Latin America is no guarantee of success in others in the same region, let alone elsewhere. Sony’s notion of “glocalization”—”think global, and act local”—is as valid today as it was when it was coined about three decades ago.

Emerging markets—in the sense of developing markets in developing countries—offer exciting prospects for many firms. They differ in many ways from developed markets, but managers should not hope for fantastic new theories for entering them or competing in them. Instead, they need to do their homework, strike a careful balance between importing ideas that worked elsewhere and developing new ones, and recognize that as outsiders they have special responsibilities towards their hosts.

Strategy is always a learning process, and even more so in emerging markets. But emphasis needs to be on learning about these places, not about new strategy concepts or management tools.

IN SUMMARY

Success in these markets depends, more than anything, on putting the right people on the ground with all the support they need.

They should balance a core set of strategic principles and a proven management approach with a sensitivity to local attitudes, customs, and behaviours, and always be respectful of these.

They should understand the importance of local knowledge, and never stop searching for new insights.

And most importantly, they should couple these practical actions with a preparedness to do what it takes to fit in (within reason) and the determination to improvise through difficulties.

Tony Manning_Essentials for emerging market success

A CHECKLIST TO GET YOU GOING
  1. Mindset matters. Given the hurdles you’ll face, you and your people have to really, really, really want to try. You have to be bold, you have to be able to adapt, and you’ll need both courage and perseverance. Above all, you’ll need to be resourceful—your ability to “make a plan” will be constantly tested.
  2. Appoint people who’ll be happy there. Living in Luanda or Laos is not like living in Los Angeles or London. It can be tough. Especially on families. Everyone can’t do it. So give them every chance to understand what they’re taking on, and all the encouragement and support they’ll need.
  3. Go “where the warm armpits are.” As Ted Levitt liked to say, there’s only one way to really understand any market, and that’s to go there and immerse yourself in it. To watch the locals and listen to them. To get to know what turns them on and off, and to learn how things work.
  4. Remember the first principles. Just as focus, value, and costs must be your mantra in developed markets, so they must guide your every action in emerging markets.
  5. Explore, experiment and learn fast. No matter how you prepare, no matter how good your initial information seems to be, and no matter how carefully you think through your strategy, you will get things wrong. This is a fact of life in any market, and especially so in developing ones.
  6. Get stakeholders on your side. You have to gain the support of government, communities, workers—the same array of players you deal with in your home market. But in emerging markets you probably have to work much harder to educate people about business in general and your business in particular. They have to understand not just what you expect of them, but what you can do for them. “Out there,” they can make or break you.
  7. Develop local partnerships. In some countries, they may be mandatory. In many, they’re necessary to open doors, smooth your entry, build alliances, and facilitate your growth. Their knowledge, experience, and contacts can be invaluable and make the difference between success and failure.
  8. Clear values, no compromises. While adaptability is critical, you have to be certain about how you need to behave and what you will and will not do, or you’ll be jerked around constantly—and a sitting duck for crazy demands and corruption. So set the rules early, or someone with another agenda will set them for you.
  9. Be willing to build your own infrastructure. This may mean anything from a shopping centre to a power plant or a water purification facility, roads or runways, a sewage system, accommodation for your staff, or schools and clinics for communities. It could mean offering to train local officials or upgrade their IT systems. Or it could mean working closely with PR or advertising agencies, or other service suppliers, to develop their capacity.
  10. Try, try, and try again. Cracking an emerging market is not a quick process. It’ll take most companies a lot longer than they expect, and cost far more. If you don’t go in for the long haul, you’re wasting your time. If you can’t keep picking yourself up, and adjusting your strategy, you may as well stay at home.
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