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- Ideas collapsed:: true - Bad Strategy - Bad strategy is not simply the absence of good strategy. It grows out of specific misconceptions and leadership dysfunctions. - To detect a bad strategy, look for one or more of its four major hallmarks: - Fluff - Failure to face the challenge. - Mistaking goals for strategy. - Bad strategic objectives. - Bad strategy is long on goals and short on policy or action. - Dog’s Dinner Objective collapsed:: true - Goals and Objectives collapsed:: true - To help clarify this distinction it is helpful to use the word “goal” to express overall values and desires and to use the word “objective” to denote specific operational targets. Thus, the United States may have “goals” of freedom, justice, peace, security, and happiness. It is strategy which transforms these vague overall goals into a coherent set of actionable objectives—defeat the Taliban and rebuild a decaying infrastructure. - A leader’s most important job is creating and constantly adjusting this strategic bridge between goals and objectives. - Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes. - Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes. - One form of bad strategic objectives occurs when there is a scrambled mess of things to accomplish—a “dog’s dinner” of strategic objectives. - Then, in recognition that it is a dog’s dinner, the label “long-term” is added so that none of them need be done today. - - THE UNWILLINGNESS OR INABILITY TO CHOOSE - Strategy involves focus and, therefore, choice. - Serious strategy work in an already successful organization may not take place until the wolf is at the door—or even until the wolf’s claws actually scratch on the floor—because good strategy is very hard work. - There is difficult psychological, political, and organizational work in saying “no” to whole worlds of hopes, dreams, and aspirations. - Any coherent strategy pushes resources toward some ends and away from others. - Put differently, universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice. - Whatever you think about this definition of leadership, a problem arises when it is confused with strategy. ==Leadership and strategy may be joined in the same person, but they are not the same thing.== **Leadership inspires and motivates self-sacrifice**. Change, for example, requires painful adjustments, and good leadership helps people feel more positively about making those adjustments. **Strategy is the craft of figuring out which purposes are both worth pursuing and capable of being accomplished.** - new thought and bad strategy collapsed:: true - This fascination with positive thinking, and its deep connections to inspirational and spiritual thought, was invented about 150 years ago in New England as a mutation of Protestant Christian individualism. - The Protestant Reformation was founded on the principle that people did not need the Catholic Church to stand between them and the deity. - Called the New Thought movement, it combined religious sentiment with recommendations for worldly success. - The theory was that thinking about success leads to success. And that thinking about failure leads to failure. - Thoughts Are Things, published in 1889, was a founding epistle of New Thought movement. - Wallace Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich (1910). His theme was that each person has godlike powers, but he stripped out any direct references to religion, creating a series of quasi-religious incantations: - Today, these ideas are called “New Age,” despite the fact that they are almost verbatim repetitions of books published a century ago. - Elements of New Thought have recently seeped into strategic thinking through literature on leadership and vision. - Much of the work in this area provides a healthy counterweight to bureaucratic and rational-action views of management and organization. But recently it has taken on a flavor reminiscent of Mulford’s 1889 Thoughts Are Things. The analogy fostering this displacement is between an individual thought and shared vision within an organization. - To see this displacement, consider Peter Senge’s enormously successful book The Fifth Discipline, published in 1990. - - kernel collapsed:: true - The core content of a strategy is a diagnosis of the situation at hand, the creation or identification of a guiding policy for dealing with the critical difficulties, and a set of coherent actions. - A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation. #Situational Awareness - diagnosis is a judgment about the meanings of facts. - a good strategic diagnosis does more than explain a situation—it also defines a domain of action. - This “vision” communicates an ambition, but it is not a strategy or a guiding policy because there is no information about how this ambition will be accomplished. - Good strategy is not just “what” you are trying to do. It is also “why” and “how” you are doing it. - the heart of the matter in strategy is usually advantage. - Pushing further along, Stephanie began to explore the guiding policy of “serve the busy professional.” After some more tinkering, Stephanie sharpened the guiding policy a bit more, deciding to target “the busy professional who has little time to cook.” - Many people call the guiding policy “the strategy” and stop there. This is a mistake. - The INSEAD library holds a bronze statue of Doriot inscribed with his observation “Without action, the world would still be an idea.” - The actions within the kernel of strategy should be coherent. That is, the resource deployments, policies, and maneuvers that are undertaken should be consistent and coordinated. The coordination of action provides the most basic source of leverage or advantage available in strategy. - The idea that coordination, by itself, can be a source of advantage is a very deep principle. - More specifically, design is the engineering of fit among parts, specifying how actions and resources will be combined. - - Specialization collapsed:: true - On the other hand, the potential gains to coordination do not mean that more centrally directed coordination is always a good thing. Coordination is costly, because it fights against the gains to specialization, the most basic economies in organized activity. To specialize in something is, roughly speaking, to be left alone to do just that thing and not be bothered with other tasks, interruptions, and other agents’ agendas. - As is clear to anyone who has belonged to a coordinating committee, coordination interrupts and de-specializes people. - - leverage - Archimedes, one of the smartest people who ever lived, said, “Give me a lever long enough, a fulcrum strong enough, and I’ll move the world.” - In general, strategic leverage arises from a mixture of anticipation, insight into what is most pivotal or critical in a situation, and making a concentrated application of effort. - As an example of anticipation, while the SUV craze was booming in the United States, Toyota invested more than $1 billion in developing hybrid gasoline-electric technologies: - In many circumstances, anticipation simply means considering the habits, preferences, and policies of others, as well as various inertias and constraints on change. - To achieve leverage, the strategist must have insight into a pivot point that will magnify the effects of focused energy and resources. - A Threshold Effect exists when there is a critical level of effort necessary to affect the system. id:: 63eac6a7-47c3-4b8e-82ea-c4e078489daa - For example, there seems to be a threshold effect in advertising. That is, a very small amount of advertising will produce no result at all. One has to get over this hump, or threshold, to start getting a response to advertising efforts.