Survival guide for Strategists

Navigating the challenges of the modern day workplace!

It is not easy being a strategist at the modern workplace. The corporate workplace today is designed more for driving operational efficiency and audacious goals rather than true strategy.

In such times, the strategists can become very disillusioned. When I mean “Strategists” here, I don’t just mean the people who have “strategy” in their job title but I mean any individual who understands the core concepts of strategy such as choice, customer value, execution etc. and wants to apply them in the modern workplace (checkout my earlier piece on the ingredients of a successful strategist).

There are some evils that a strategist must contend with and ignore to some extent to be able to work meaningfully. Strategic utopia exists rarely and therefore this is more of a practical guide around navigating these evils successfully. Here are some of my tips for a strategist to survive (and maybe thrive)!

Let the Goals be!

The modern workplace is full of BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal). Our friend Svyatoslav Biryulin has written a really nice piece on goals, which I will urge you to read.

The modern executive gets some kind of rush to define goals for their business unit or function. It gives them some kind of purpose of being a higher being. Some goals will even have a nice whiff of megalomania. E.g. Our goal is to be the best in class or most loved or most revered and so on. A purist strategist would most likely remind their executives that goals are not strategy, but it is not something they are very likely to get their leaders to understand.

Image credit: Dilbert

So what do we do: So here is my piece of advice, let the Goals be! Instead change the narrative. You should be an advisor to your executive and suggest “now that you have set these mighty goals lord, how do you propose we reach here?” This is where a strategist influences and brings in the concepts of customer value and choice. Make sure you drive these two core concepts instead of fighting a battle on goals, which you are most likely to lose.

If you are able to create a guiding policy (in the words of Richard Rumelt) driven by choice and creating superior customer value, you my friend have done half your job of creating the outline of a good strategy. It is this policy that would lead to identification of strategic initiatives to achieve these goals.

Ignore operational efficiency sneaking into strategy

Roger Martin has arguably come up with the best tool to differentiate operational initiatives from strategic initiatives. Here it goes

• If the opposite of your initiative sounds stupid, it is operational

• If the opposite of your initiative sounds reasonable, it is strategic

For e.g., If your initiative is to decrease costs to increase margins, the opposite of that would be to increase costs to decrease margins (well that does sound stupid). This is purely an operational initiative. Whereas if your initiative was to decrease costs to create lower priced products to serve customers in value segment - well the opposite of that could be to use higher quality (costs) items to create higher value products (maybe more expensive products) to serve customers in premium segment - well this does not sound stupid at all, therefore this initiative is indeed strategic.

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Operational initiatives are dime a dozen in any strategic plan. Productivity initiatives, managing inventory initiatives, selling expense reduction initiatives and the list goes on. As a strategy purist, this might pinch you but you need to let it be. You are not going to curry any favour with your business leader by telling him/her that productivity improvement is not a strategic initiative! You are more likely to be sidelined or worse still being made responsible to drive it 🙂

So what do we do: Ensure that operational initiatives don’t end up dominating the entire strategic plan. It is like a necessary evil that you have to ignore but to the extent that it should not by itself end up being the entire strategic plan. I think herein you will need to educate your business leader about the balance between operational and true customer and choice driven strategic initiatives. There is no rule of thumb here but guidance would be, always have more strategic initiatives then operational initiatives. This is a very crude way of spelling it out but also a more practical advice.

KPIs list will always be long, get them classified

Management loves KPIs (key performance indicators)! There is a KPI for everything and everything is important. There is a KPI for sales, for costs, for inventory, for productivity, for efficiency, for meetings, for offsites and everything under the sky. The zealousness to have a KPI for everything gives the illusion of control. Just the illusion, mind you! This KPI battle is another difficult one to fight.

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So what do we do: Prioritize. The essence here is to work with management to make them appreciate that some KPIs are more important than the other. You need to work very closely to help identify what I call are the “God KPIs”. These KPIs dwarf all others and their achievement is what matters. Now another intricate thing to do here is to insure that some God KPIs link to your strategic initiatives as well. In the end, from a long list get to a short list of God KPIs.

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The role of a strategists is not to find an optimal place to create strategy but to help make the management more strategic wherever they are. The high road is a nice road to take but if you go around trying to find the perfect company to execute strategy at, you will most probably just keep roaming around all your life. It is critical that we understand the limitations of the modern workplace and try to bring strategic elements to address them rather than dismissing them altogether in search of better pastures.

I am sure there are more such survival tricks for strategists. If you have some good ones, do drop them in the comments below. I hope you enjoy reading this. See you next week.