It’s hard teaching strategy, particularly to anyone without much work experience, because they generally have no conception of what it is and nothing much we can relate it to. One route is to consider what strategy is not and “aspiration” is one of the things on the “not” list.
Vacuous intentions to generate value through customer service, to deliver top quartile earnings or to be a world leader in anything are motherhood and apple pie statements. They don’t in the least help answer Robert Grant’s two basic questions about strategy:
- Where to compete?(Grant, 2010, p18)
- How to compete?
If your “strategy” doesn’t answer those two questions, you don’t have a strategy at all. If you answer the questions without clear insight into the key strategic challenges your organisation faces, you don’t have a meaningful strategy. If you don’t have coherent principles to guide your actions, you don’t have a practical strategy. Finally, if you have captured all of those things but fail to communicate them in a succinct, impactful way, you have a dull and probably ineffective strategy as you won’t get your colleagues behind it.
For a much better exposition of this, turn to Richard Rumelt, author of one of the best recent strategy books, “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy”. A summary on McKinsey Quarterly gives a good flavour.
I had the briefest of corridor conversations with my colleague Eliot Lloyd last week in which we considered building a strategy module round Rumelt’s book. The discussion went roughly: “Shall we?” “Yes.” Watch this space!
Does this help with a UK strategy to close our energy gap? It’s not a genuinely competitive problem, of course, but replace Grant’s questions with “which generation technologies will we back?” and “how will we back them?” and the answers could be a strategy.
Grant, R. M., (2010) Contemporary Strategy Analysis 7th ed. Chichester: Wiley
About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.
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A week back or so I was helping a District AIDS Task Force with Strategic planning. Putting this in perspective it is important to note that this Task force is a multisector coalition with people from the healthcare services, education, agriculture et cetera. Some medical personnel in attendance questioned the relevance of spending so much time thinking and planning long term and not dealing with they operational challenges of inadequate diagnostic and monitoring equipment for ante retroviral therapy (ART). I retorted that while it was important to deal with the current emergency it is important to note that there are emegencies that are avoidable if we think strategically... and of course as we went deeper into the sessions they saw my point!
ReplyDeleteI cite the above to make a point that in the third world where so much of life is an "emergency" many times it is difficult for people to think that they should "worst" their time in developing a "strategy" or strategic direction at what ever level one may choice. this article is therefore a welcome reminder of the importance of investing our energies in answering the issue of competetive edge through the where and how.
I think there is usually a tension between the immediate and the longer-term. It can express itself in a number of ways. I was at a meeting the other day where it expressed itself as being realistic (dealing with where we are now) and unrealistic (looking at where we could be). Both are necessary, of course. One of the challenges is to make the two join up somehow.
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