In 2002, Larry Bossidy wrote a book with Ram Charan called Execution about the discipline of getting things done. The book gives the reader a strong sense of how a focused executive can get things done efficiently in pursuit of a competitive goal. At one point, explaining why he focuses on execution, Bossidy gives strategy short shrift. He says:
“So much thinking has gone into strategy that it’s no longer an intellectual challenge. You can rent any strategy you want from a consulting firm.”
He’s partly right. There has been a remarkable amount of conceptual innovation in strategy, much of which has made strategy less of an intellectual conundrum. He’s also right that there are plenty of consulting firms willing to sell their very latest strategy innovation. But (as he repeatedly points out) you can’t build an organization on a rented or borrowed strategy. It has to be yours. You have to come up with it. In other words, you have to think it.
This is an introduction to a series of articles on strategy and its development, how we think about it and how we try to help clients think about it. Although we do most of our work in a single vertical industry and we know more than a lot about that industry, we try to provide guidance in strategy in a way that isn’t the prisoner of our industry knowledge. We’re firm believers that you can’t develop good strategy without a thorough understanding of the industry you’re working in. Almost equally however, we believe that good strategy thinking needs to respect some of the theory of strategy that has been developed most notably in the last 50 or so years. The client doesn’t have to know the theory – but conversations about strategy need to accommodate it in order to prevent just another hackneyed industry discussion that goes round in circles.
So we’re not going to talk a lot of theory. For us, developing strategy should be focused on getting things done. Strategy lives in an organization’s doing. It cannot be encapsulated in a statement or presentation. It’s always a living work in progress – not a dead letter. The aim of strategy development is to instill a shared strategy in the minds of senior executives so that their actions flow from it; so that all their actions are informed by it and their conversations talk about actions – not strategic theory.
As with many senior executives, Larry Bossidy’s strategic thinking is deeply ingrained. Understanding the essence of the strategy and the analytical process for developing it have been so internalized that they are almost indivisible. He’s always in execution mode, but always thinking and talking with an awareness of the strategic context. He’s not just doing stuff. He’s thinking about doing stuff strategically. Ironically, while Bossidy can tell you how to execute, he says he can’t teach you how to think strategically. I’m not sure a few website posts can teach you that either, but they can at least help to show you what kind of skills are essential if you want to become an executive who can hack out strategy.
When strategy is being made well by senior professionals with deep experience in their industry it isn’t a linear process and it doesn’t sound like a strategy seminar. It sounds like a regular business discussion. It’s all over the place. It’s messy because it’s trying to account for many variables in a dynamic environment about which there is usually a whole lot we don’t know. It covers only a few of the issues of a typical comprehensive strategy-making list because the senior management group knows which issues in that list are most important from their direct experience of their business and environment. The group thrashes out ways to make sense of the situation and forge a successful way forward in a conversation whose underlying coherence is often only understood by its participants intuitively.
From a consultant’s perspective, strategy development should be focused on the quality and flow of this conversation and the thinking that informs it – both the content and the form – because that leads directly to the right things being done at the right time. This may sound ethereal or theoretical, but thinking strategy – how to do that thinking, not just what it is – is the most practical help you can get in strategy development.
The pieces to follow will offer a way of exploring the strategy thinking skillset that is second nature to many experienced executives. They could in some ways form the shadow text to Bossidy’s. He wants to tell the story of getting to execution with strategy in mind. These articles will describe strategy development with execution in mind. They will hopefully tell the story of what is going on in the head of someone like Larry Bossidy, or what is behind the discussions that a senior group might have while trying to execute.
