
Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Strategies (2017) - anthilemoon
https://hbr.org/2017/11/many-strategies-fail-because-theyre-not-actually-strategies
======
moksly
We have a scientist in Denmark called Morten Münster who wrote a book called
“Jytte fra marketing er desværre gået for i dag” (Karen from marketing has
unfortunately left for the day), in which he talks a lot about the necessity
of clear and simple strategies that can be understood by employees at 3pm on a
busy Thursday. He has a lot of good examples, but mostly he outlines how silly
something a long the lines of “forward together” is as a strategy because it
quite literally means nothing to anyone who does any real work.

It agrees with this article, and I always find it kind of hilarious. I do work
on the public sector, and we’re exceptionally bad at implementing strategies,
despite having hundreds of people working on it. The thing is though, that
most of those people have read these articles and books, exactly like this
one. So apparently knowing these things aren’t even helping us implement
meaningful strategies.

After years in the bureaucracy I’ve long learned to simply keep quiet while
these pseudo-workers do their thing, and then get things done when they leave.
Then you can always word the work up to sound like it plays into whatever
current strategy we’re pursuing at the end of the year review.

~~~
toolslive
one of my more sarcastic personalities derives great pleasure in comparing
what's happening in the workplace with what's described as effective sabotage
in the CIA's field manual.

[https://corporate-rebels.com/cia-field-manual/](https://corporate-
rebels.com/cia-field-manual/)

tip for pro's : you can play the bingo version too!

~~~
itronitron
I wouldn't be surprised if the authors of the cia field manual just copied
verbatim their management training manual

~~~
toolslive
now that is sarcasm with a big 'S'. Love it.

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burlesona
If you’re interested in this topic, the best book I’ve read is called Good
Strategy Bad Strategy. It’s an excellent read. Here’s the main takeaway:

A real strategy consists of the following parts, which the author calls the
“kernel” of a strategy. If any of these are missing, you don’t have a
strategy.

1) A diagnosis of the problem or opportunity.

2) A high level guiding policy / hypothesis for how to respond.

3) Coherent Actions that will be your first / primary steps to execute on the
strategy.

I’ve found that just getting that idea into my head has transformed the way I
think about problems, and plan and communicate responses. I couldn’t recommend
the book enough.

~~~
texasbigdata
Also "Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works" by the old CEO of procter and
gamble and the dean of the toronto business school. In addition to good
strategy / bad strategy, playing to win is sort of heads and shoulder above
anything else strategy related and on the level of the legendary grove and
porter books. Strongly recommend as well.

~~~
nickpinkston
Fully agree - those are my two favorites too.

I also like "Strategy in Action" for more concrete / less abstract thinkers
more focused on execution. These people shouldn't be working on company
strategy, but this step-by-step approach is a good fit for them I think.

Also nice, they're all on Audible.

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Dwolb
“Strategy is choosing what not to do” is the standard trope.

Start-ups sorta get this already: focus on a core base of customers who love
your product despite its flaws. Iterate.

The insight I liked best in this article was, “In contrast, top executives
should resist the temptation to decide what projects live and die within their
firms. Strategy implementation requires top managers to design the company’s
internal system that does the selection for them.”

So much your job as an exec is to design the system that gives others enough
context and autonomy to flourish.

And hopefully over time that system continues to improve itself.

~~~
luckydata
that's not strategy though, that's a process to inform a strategy.

~~~
chiefalchemist
I don't disagree with you per se. But perhaps it's a strategy that yields a
process, which aims to yield more strategy?

Part recursive. Part dog-fooding.

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chrisweekly
As a mostly-solo entrepreneur / consultant, I've had some success in shifting
professional engagements toward the "strategic consulting" end of the
spectrum. I credit author R. Rumelt ("Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"), and FB VP
Product J. Zhao ("How to be Strategic") for excellent perspective and
actionable advice, which distills down to:

A strategy is a set of actions designed to achieve a particular objective.

The actions need to be credible, coherent, and focused.

Designing them properly takes hard work.

The most practical path to actually being strategic:

1\. "Wild Success": Create alignment around what it looks like

2\. "Problems / Whose": Deeply grok problem space and its ecosys, and be
crystal clear abt what problems looking to solve, and for whom.

3\. Prioritize: Focus means saying "no". Cut, ruthlessly, anything
inessential.

Working on applying these ideas outside work context, too.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> A strategy is a set of actions designed to achieve a particular objective.

Yes. I have seen people at my work make that same error that you describe.

It took the form of a bullet point in a presentation, "our strategy is to
migrate to the Foo platform, for these (valid) reasons".

And I couldn't help thinking: That is a good goal, but it won't happen unless
you make it happen. You don't have a strategy for that goal until you allocate
time to it, set milestones, get buy-in from below, get management to tell
people to it, decide which teams will go first, etc. Without that, all you
have is a vague aspiration. Not a strategy.

Getting to the details of the strategy means committing to doing something
even though there is effort involved, and since available effort is short
supply, that means you have to choose.

~~~
chrisweekly
What "error"? That definition comes straight from Richard Rumelt who wrote one
of the all-time most influential books on strategy. And of _course_ you have
to actually take action and not merely talk about it! That goes without
saying. If you read the rest of my comment, you'll see I mention the same
things you do, in similar words! "it takes hard work", "create alignment",
"prioritize... saying no" etc.

Hard to tell if you're just trolling. Responded anyway just in case you simply
rushed to make a point w/out noticing you'd entirely missed mine.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> What "error"? That definition comes straight from Richard Rumelt

You're totally misreading. You made no error in your first post, I was
agreeing with you.

The error is people not understanding what a strategy is. A strategy is a plan
of action, not merely a goal.

So that no-one can possibly misunderstand I will rephrase that as "I have seen
people at my work make that same error that you describe".

In general, it's not good for you to respond, clearly upset but not
understanding, in the heat of the moment like that.

> Hard to tell if you're just trolling. Responded anyway just in case you
> simply rushed to make a point w/out noticing you'd entirely missed mine.

That's not a nice way to respond, at all, to someone who is corroborating.
Quite ironic, though.

~~~
lowdose
I still have no idea what you are talking about.

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lordnacho
There's a lot of fluff in this article but the main things for me are that
strategy includes deciding what not to do, and that it's easy to mistake goals
for strategies.

Maybe the best place to see this is sports. How often have you been playing a
match, and at some point the coach says "we need to score a goal"? As if
that's not obvious. What he needs to say is "keep a high line and only let the
defenders take time to pass".

~~~
TheMightyLlama
The problem with "Keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to
pass" is still a tactic. Having recently started attempting to understand what
a strategy really is, I've understood the following.

A strategy is tripartite. The Strategy, it's Guiding Principles and Actions
(tactics)

A strategy takes into account the environment within which one is working and
to view it as a dynamic thing. In your football example we might be able to
say that the dynamic part of the game is how the opposition arranges their
players and who is in which position.

Knowing this we can define some Guiding Principles for the individual game.
One might choose a loaded and strong defence as your team's offence is not as
strong as the oppositions defence. The guiding principle is "Defend our
ground"

Actions (tactics) would be "Keep the few strikers far forward and protect the
defenders"

Caveat: I'm not a footballer, and I wish I had written this to end up with the
original tactic mentioned "Keep a high line and only let the defenders take
time to pass"

~~~
lordnacho
In all my reading I've never found a satisfactory distinction between strategy
and tactics. Every attempt I've seen either doesn't provide a clear answer or
falls on some simple contradiction.

My current thinking is that people tend to think of strategy as higher level
than tactics, but that there's never a clear line that tells you which you are
looking at. It's more the importance you want to give some decision that
determines what you call it.

~~~
ScalaFan
Here is an example within the world of chess:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#Strategy_and_tactics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#Strategy_and_tactics)

They are very well understood and delineated within that context.

~~~
lordnacho
> These two aspects of the gameplay cannot be completely separated, because
> strategic goals are mostly achieved through tactics, while the tactical
> opportunities are based on the previous strategy of play.

~~~
ScalaFan
And yet when you ask a chess player whether the situation has a tactic or a
strategy in it (in some cases both), they can tell you which choice is a
tactic and which is a strategy. Tactics are so well recognized that you can
practice them:
[https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated](https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated)

------
simonh
“Focusing is about saying ‘no,‘” Jobs explained at Apple’s 1997 Worldwide
Developers Conference (WWDC). “You’ve got to say ‘no, no, no’ and when you say
‘no,’ you piss people off.”

------
invalidOrTaken
I used to read a lot about strategy, but it didn't feel like I was getting
anywhere.

The thing is, it's _such_ a big topic, and _so_ context-dependent, that so
many "conversations about strategy" end up with the conversants either talking
past each other, with Bob and Alice using the same words but meaning different
things by them. This is how consultants get their reputations as purveyors of
fluff---either the consultant is a space cadet and is talking about
generalities without translation into the clients' reality, or the _client_ is
not understanding (or not listening to!) the consultant, who is later maligned
as a purveyor of fluff.

A lot of the problem stems from people thinking and talking at different
layers of abstraction. We all suck at talking about strategy, but programmers
are probably the best at understanding _why_ we suck.

For most people, most of the time, we're better off staying concrete.

------
JoeAltmaier
A _strategic plan_ must also have decision points and alternatives laid out.
Not just a direction. Not just the logic behind. What to do when X happens;
how far to reach when goals are not being met; how much to spend.

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abakker
Strategy is choices we make to achieve a goal. Those choices represent implied
utility through the reduction in optionality.

Executing a strategy means making the trade offs between utility and
opportunity cost, to arrive at a prioritization of choices, and then realizing
those opportunity costs.

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cryptica
All this stuff is so obvious, why does it even need to be written down? It's
hard to believe that people don't know this intuitively.

I guess there are so many highly paid bureaucrats who don't know what they're
doing or why they're doing it that such basic articles have become a
necessity.

------
brlewis
“If there is one thing I have learned about communicating choices, it is that
we always focus on what the choices are. I now realize you have to spend at
least as much time on explaining the logic behind the choices.”

This is a great thing to keep in mind for engineering architecture and policy.

