About a million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and I was tentatively embarking on a career in advertising, there was one phrase whispered with reverence and coveted above all others.
No, it wasn’t “expense account” – although that came a close second!
It was STRATEGY.
This remains one of my favourite Strategy books of all time. Good Strategy…and Bad Strategy. Too often the difference is the latter can never be executed.
Strategy was the pinnacle of intellectual ability, the domain of the blue-flame thinkers and required the fine art and mental dexterity of long “strokey-beard” meetings.
Tactics and executing stuff was for junior folks and Production people.
Strategy was filled with rarified air and strictly for the 1%.
Somewhere along the line I was granted access, learnt the secret handshake and was admitted behind the velvet rope into Account Planning. Having a funky accent is a distinct advantage let me tell you.
And I LOVED IT. The strokey-beard stuff, the “deep thinking”, the part where clients asked for your opinion on their business, their customers, their products old and new, the emerging trends and the ignorable fads. It was Nirvana for a curious mind and there was an undeniable buzz from being in that zone.
But there was a wonderful paradox that soon became abundantly clear.
Any Strategy that can’t be executed is nothing more than a well-designed Powerpoint and some serious intellectual masturbation.
Strategy may be the bright shiny light but if you can’t land the plane, or as Seth Godin calls it “if you don’t ship” then all the vigorous stroking of your beard amounts to nothing more than a chin rash.
To be clear, this is not a dismissal of Strategy – far from it. This is a dismissal of the type of Strategy that Richard Rumelt delightfully calls “nothing more than a Wish List” and a ringing endorsement for the unavoidable and bone-jarring work required to actually execute that Strategy.
Yet, time and again, the single largest determinant standing between an executable Strategy and that pretty Powerpoint is your Culture.
The Culture aka the humans in your organization. The excited or the ambivalent humans. The Agile or the Fragile humans. The “failure is okay around here” or the “I live in perpetual fear and anxiety” humans. The “we embrace change” or the “we cling to the status quo” humans.
All the process mapping, systems re-engineering and IT infrastructure investment in the world will not magically make your Strategy come to fruition if your humans don’t want it to happen. That point has been made for over a decade by celebrated authors and experts from Tony Saldanha to Stan Slap and yet we continue to worship Strategy as an organizational panacea while giving short-shrift to the critical mechanisms that allow us to move from bold idea to beautiful reality.
Real-life examples are strewn all around us.
Despite holding over 80% of global mobile phone sales, Nokia was unable to counter the entrance of Apple into their space and struggled to internalize how a California firm that just put 1,000 songs in the palm of your hand could quickly turn an iPod into an iPhone. This wasn’t a lack of talent or a lack of R&D and certainly wasn’t a lack of Market Intelligence, it was a culture so convinced of their own strength and omnipotence they couldn’t imagine an upstart could ever unseat them.
Microsoft stock performance - Satya Nadella took over in 2014
Microsoft under Steve Ballmer had such a reputation for a toxic competitive culture that a popular cartoon personified the company org chart as a series of guns pointed each other. Is it any surprise Microsoft were unable to successfully execute any Strategy to capture the rapidly-evolving IT trends (like mobile) of the time? Counter that with new Microsoft leadership, under Satya Nadella, that has placed a premium on switching from a “know it all” culture to a “learn it all” culture and seen a successful Strategic transition to cloud-based services – and a stock market bump that is the envy of any CEO.
I haven’t lost my affection and admiration for Strategy. There remains a critical requirement for great Strategy in any business – particularly those looking to recover and rise from COVID.
However, I do smile at the naivety of my younger self and the disdain he held for the critical skills of Execution. And his youthful lack of understanding that business, any business, is about one simple and timeless truth.
It’s all about the Humans.