
Don't Be So F*cking Strategic - aaronbrethorst
http://sriramk.tumblr.com/post/10352374326/dont-be-so-f-king-strategic
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knodi
This reminds me of the Joker quote from The Dark Knight;

The Joker: Do I really look like a guy with a plan?...I just... do things. The
mob has plans, the cops have plans... they're schemers. Schemers trying to
control their little worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how
pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

This is how I feel about "strategy sessions", these "strategy sessions" are
almost always held by businessmen wannabes and lead to nothing but bullshit
and guesses presented as facts.

Just go out and do it then come back with your findings now you have facts
that you can work with.

~~~
cek
While I agree with Sriram's overall point in this post, I think your comment
shows there is another point Sriram is making (but not explicitly):

    
    
       Have a plan, but know that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. 
    

Planning/strategy sessions can be very, very useful in helping to form a plan
early on. They expose ideas and roadblocks and hard questions. They are a
MEANS to an end and that END is NOT a strategy. It's a set of hard problems,
ideas to pursue, and a framework for making decisions (and sticking to them)
that is the END.

So don't take Sriram's advice too literally. He's not saying "Don't plan".
He's not saying "Don't ever think about strategy". What he's saying is, like
everything in life, do it with moderation.

~~~
philwelch
"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." --Eisenhower

"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed
next week." --Patton

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drcube
Off topic, but can we please stop pretending that an asterisk means you didn't
just say "fucking"? That is pure superstition.

If you're going to use a word, use it. If not, don't. Fuck.

~~~
fastfinner
I actually think it's politer and more agreeable to use the asterisk. It's
akin to presenting a photo of a bare-chest woman with the nipples striked-out
with a black line. Everybody knows what is there, but it makes the picture a
lot more agreeable and less obscene.

~~~
drcube
If you know what the word is, an asterisk doesn't hide anything. If you don't
(what are you, 3?), there's nothing to hide.

I don't think nudity is obscene either, but I can see why people might want to
remain private. Just because I know what a nipple looks like doesn't mean I
know what YOUR nipple looks like.

And of course, to a large segment of the population striking out bare breasts
makes the picture a lot less agreeable.

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cateye
Like most words we use for business, strategy is also off course a term from
the military. But people confuse the terms "strategy, tactics, technology,
operations" and call it all strategy.

If you have 500.000 soldiers, someone has to think about how to use this force
in a smart way. Otherwise it will be a mess and nobody knows what to do or end
up fight each other.

There are not a lot of people in an army who can define the strategy. Within
the hierarchy there are levels of strategy but then also: people executing >
people thinking.

In the corporate world, this is the other way around. Following the Dilbert
principle, organisations are full of people "analyzing" and "researching"
without any mandate or power. This results in endless meetings without any
purpose. But it sounds acceptable if they call it "strategy".

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xtacy
From my very limited experience, my take away from this post is:

    
    
        Extremes are harmful.  Be balanced.
    

So:

    
    
        Right ‘strategy’ in place before doing anything
    

Is important, but not at the expense of actually executing it and spending all
the time on:

    
    
        reams and reams of text written...
    
    

I agree it is important to have:

    
    
        Flexibility to do random things
    

But not at the cost of completely doing random things without an end goal.

The balance is hard to strike, but is something to strive for!

~~~
sriramk
Post author here. This is very true.

This post was me trying to figure out where the 'right way' to do things lie.

Here's the problem. On one hand, you have the lessons from Google being too
random and them winding up at 'more wood, fewer arrows'

On the other hand, I've seen first hand the effects of a bunch of very smart
people focused on one strategy - which happens to be the wrong one. If you
look at Microsoft in the early 2000s, their strategy around how to deal with
the web and recognizing the threat it posed to Windows is out of the book.
I've seen some very smart people articulate why it's the right thing to ignore
search and ads in 2004/2005. And obviously, it was horribly wrong.

As someone who wants to run a company, I find it fascinating to study how
companies deal with these situations and how you can design your culture to
avoid it( and without the fix being 'be as talented as Steve Jobs'). I hope
the post doesn't come across as bashing MSFT as it isn't about that - MSFT is
a good reference model for myself personally since I saw how internal decision
making worked there.

~~~
xtacy
In hindsight decisions always horribly wrong/right. But more than always being
right, I personally think it's more important to step back and admit that you
might actually be wrong and take necessary steps to correct. This summer I was
at MSFT as an intern, and I was quite surprised to see some groups which take
bold steps despite many criticising them.

Unfortunately, the overlords with all their experience, should know better.

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TomOfTTB
It's good advice but it doesn't address the core problem. The reason "all
large companies are in love with finding the right strategy" is because large
companies tend to spawn large org charts and the closer people are to the top
of that chart the more their job boils down to "build strategy". So not being
so f*cking strategic involves far fewer executives.

Meaning while the advice is good it doesn't address the actual problem which
is getting those Senior VPs to either (a) eliminate their own jobs or (b)
start churning out some code. Neither of which seems likely.

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kubrickslair
I should also add that do not try to be so f*cking revolutionary. Most
products and schemes that aim to be revolutionary seldom end up being that.
Apple has been an anomaly.

Edit: I should also add that being inside academia, I have seen some stuff
which was said to be revolutionary, and indeed did change a lot of things, but
only in the narrow scope of academic research. My comment was about the direct
real world impact.

~~~
khafra
> My comment was about the direct real world impact.

And also about the value of revolution to the first revolutionaries--it's
common to see the first movers fall, and later opportunists capitalize on the
momentum they started.

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philwelch
_Don’t get me wrong. Good strategy combined with good execution is a joy to
watch (case in point - Apple over the last decade). The last thing you would
want is people off doing their own thing and being all ‘off-strategy’ and
rebellious._

I think "strategic" is a little elaborate for Apple's actual plans since Jobs
took over. Aside from the initial jump from computers to consumer electronics,
the only actual strategic decisions Apple made were along the lines of "what
products should we try to create?", "does this product still suck or should we
release it soon?", and maybe the switch to Intel processors. They didn't fall
into the trap of thinking about second-order shit like image or positioning or
market or the economy, they just tried to figure out what would be a great
product they could make, and what products and concepts were worth pursuing or
not.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Are you forgetting about the decision to create Apple's entire retail
division, i.e. the Apple Stores? An idea which people thought was ridiculous
at the time?

Or the abandonment of support for clone hardware?

Or the decision to go into the media business by inventing the iTunes store --
but _not_ to rely on media as the primary profit center, but rather as a way
of driving sales of extremely profitable hardware?

Or the decision to base iOS on Mac OS X, but _not_ to make them exactly the
same thing, with the same apps running on both platforms?

Or the myriads of strategic decisions around the App Store, such as the strict
review policy, or the pricing model?

Or even the decision to keep Flash off of iOS, at the possible cost of good
relations with Adobe, a company that has traditionally been a bulwark of the
Mac OS creative scene?

Or are you trying to deny that these are strategic decisions?

(Note that this is _not_ meant to be an exhaustive list. For example, Tim
Cook's list of strategic manufacturing decisions has got to be twice this
size, but it's also composed of items that remain secret, or that I don't know
about or understand. But why have companies been struggling for years now to
match Apple's hardware prices? That's not a fortunate accident.)

~~~
philwelch
I would classify many of those as design decisions. Many of those seem like
unavoidable were natural consequences of other decisions, but I agree the
distinction isn't clean cut.

One of Tim Cook's strategic manufacturing decisions, as I recall, was to
literally corner the market of NAND flash memory since the heyday of the iPod.
Apple did and probably still does preorder a commanding proportion of the
world's NAND flash production every year. Is that a strategic decision or just
the natural consequence of consistently forecasting that you'll need that much
NAND flash?

It sounds like I'm minimizing everything by deeming it "not strategic", but if
you're going to characterizing the work Apple does, I don't think you'd be
that far off characterizing it as intelligent people working out the natural
consequences of a very small number of strategic decisions. If you're Apple,
and you're going to make a touchscreen phone that doesn't suck, using Mac OS X
technology, keeping Flash off, setting up the App Store the way it is are all
consequences of that.

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viscanti
Eric Ries might say that all startups are experiments, but when he does so,
he's quoting Steve Blank. It's probably nit-picking, but it seems silly to
attribute that line of thought to Ries (as much as I respect him as an
authority on Lean Startup). The author should give credit where it's due.

~~~
sriramk
Apologies, I actually didn't know that Steve Blank was the source. Will update
post.

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thunga
Strategy should be seen as broad guidelines that help middle management make
effective decisions. It is supposed to be a means to reduce communication &
decision making overhead. This in turn is supposed to make the large teams
more focused & effective.

Strategy is a process to reach the target & not a target/goal in itself.
Unfortunately, many senior executives think that strategy is all about the end
goal & end up creating wrong strategies. Mostly, the middle management will
hear these end goal strategies & have no idea about its usefulness. This
defeats the purpose & the middle management ends up wasting more time in
meetings & wasting more time instead of being more focused.

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krashidov
To an extent, even Apple practiced the do first, plan later methodology of
thinking. They were never planning on going from ipod -> touch screen iphone.
As I recall, Steve Jobs has said that he was working on the iPad before the
iPhone and thought damn, this would make a hell of a cell phone.

Hell, I don't think a strategy session came up with the app store, It was just
a creation that fit the moment.

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v21
This used to be Google's approach. Make a shit-ton of things, see which ones
caught on, then expand them. 20% time, Google Labs etc were all expressions of
this. Which they've been moving away from now - as Larry Page says, they're
"putting more wood behind fewer arrows".

~~~
sriramk
Post author here. Google is on the other end of the spectrum ( or used to be).
Elsewhere in this thread, someone made a good point of trying to find a
balance.

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ChuckMcM
Strategies get bogged down when they try to get to specific (which is to say
they stray into tactics that are 4 years out, a definite losing proposition)
So you strategy might be 'head west' which works you can evaluate your
projects against that, but the strategy 'go to San Diego' would cause a
project to heading for the Pacific ocean along the Oregon trail to get
cancelled since it was too far north. (when in fact it would help you get to
San Diego more easily once you were on the coast)

The concept is exactly similar to significant digits in science, which is to
say understand the experiment and the parameters to know who many significant
digits you can count on and don't bother with the rest.

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hammock
_Good strategy combined with good execution is a joy to watch (case in point -
Apple over the last decade)._

I wonder (because I forgot) who did people used to fawn over, or hold up on a
pedestal, or revere, or look up to, before Apple came out with the iPod and
all this other greatness of the last decade?

Who was doing it well before Apple came along and became the go-to example for
everything?

~~~
sunir
Google. Before them, Amazon. Before them, Microsoft. Before them, IBM.

The industry always wants to emulate the current leader, forgetting that there
are a myriad of different strategies available. That's because collectively,
given the limited space in news headlines, we're not much smarter than a
school of fish. However, individually we can each do better by reading enough
history and being focused on and aware of our personal circumstances.

------
william42
I can't help but get a sense that the author is mythologizing and mystifying
Apple. Is Apple really that unique?

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gkn
And this is why I am doing a start up - and praying we are not growing
large(?)

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Swizec
Something tells me a whole lot of startups could do with not being so fucking
strategic and Just Doing It.

Actually, I think large companies can _afford_ to be far more strategic than
your average startup.

~~~
sriramk
Actually, it's the other way around. Strategy isn't some dirty word that
people in suits like to toss around - it is just about deciding what you're
going to do.

Large companies can afford to dink around with unsuccessful, random projects.
Startups have such few resources that you absolutely need to focus and hope
you're down the right path. Constantly re-evaluating and 'pivoting' can
absolutely be part of your strategy too.

