Strategy is one of those glamour words in business. Its something that everyone seems to want to do or be involved with. I know I was guilt of this throughout my thirties but it wasn’t until I worked with some real strategists over the last ten years that I started to understand what that word meant. But I wasn’t alone.
During my time at HSBC, I worked in a Strategic Planning team. They were a nice group but they seemed more like ‘special projects’ than anything to do with strategy. It was only when I worked with Curtis Chen, Michelle Rayner and Sue Jamieson that I started to learn what strategy really was and how it needs to be written. I sue the word ‘started’ advisedly, because I hesitate to claim that I know what I’m doing even now, but I seem to know a lot more than most.
What they taught me was that strategy essentially comes down to two key questions: where you will play and how you will win. That implies choices because you can’t play everywhere, and you can’t be good at everything. I briefly worked with Paul McGowan who made this throwaway comment like it was nothing, but it made so many things slot into place for me: a good strategy helps people make choices.
To be honest, that’s it whether its strategy or brand (which Paul was talking about). Much like the Karate Kid, if you can understand these three statements, that’s all you need. And they make a mockery of so many presentations and papers that say they are an organisation’s strategy, because rarely do they get anywhere close to answering those questions. They spend huge amounts of your time demonstrating how clever the author is, how much homework they’ve done, and how pretty the slides are. But they don’t help anyone in an organization to make their choices on a daily if not hourly basis.
When answering the ‘where will we play’ question, I’ve found a slide like this really helps. It lays out the different strategic factors or axes, and then provides the different choices for each of them. That means it’s not only clear what choice has been made, but which options have been identified and rejected. Sometimes the strategy might have phases where a business starts with one set of choices and builds on those foundations which enable a second set of choices in phase 2. Nevertheless, the choices are obvious, and can guide teams across a business.
I don’t want to belittle the homework by the way. But the homework should result in a slide of axes and choices, but authors (‘strategists’) do have a habit of providing lots of data and graphs without any form of conclusion which pulls it all together.
So three questions:
1. Where will we play
2. How will we win
3. Will that make choices obvious
...and you’ll be a raver in a filing cabinet. Sorted.