In business, money can buy most of the things we need.
Except Strategy.
Strategy consulting is similar to magic, unfortunately
Everyone sooner or later realizes that they need a strategy to achieve the results they aspire to.
Often a new strategy is also needed to achieve the same results as always just because the market becomes more crowded and technologies more accessible so competition increases and buyer behavior changes as a result.
It comes easy to think that there are companies that simply because they have positioned themselves as “strategy consulting firms” can provide what is needed. A flamboyant new strategy that, once brought into the company and installed, just turn the key and things change.
If you have ever bought one of these consultations you will have realized that they always begin with a famous assessment, a period in which it is not clear what happens except that you have to answer a series of questions whose answers are put into a very expensive presentation that says nothing new and rarely says it more clearly.
And based on this empirical understanding of the status quo, a group of wizards is proposing new guidelines that promise to make stakeholders a lot of money and probably pay back the advice itself.
But the model is completely broken
When you look at the business model of consulting firms you realize that what they sell is not actually the Strategy but the hours of the people who are supposed to execute it.
Two paradoxes arise.
The first is that the complexity of the strategy sold is linearly proportional to the profitability of the consulting firm. There is always a need for more man-hours, men who just happen not to have the same skills as those in the company.
The second concerns the role of leaders and executives who are paid to devise those strategies but buy out and, as a result, are unable to execute by-design.
No one can sell you a good Strategy except your team
Consultants do not know two key things about devising an effective strategy.
- The business model in detail (not summarily) along with past trends and success stories;
- The real financial, human, and technological resources to implement any strategy.
The “bought” strategies end up so dangerously sensible on paper that no one questions them.
In contrast, however, the people who really know these two pieces of information well are your team.
What the Strategy is not, and why no one wants to attend the next meeting
Companies are full of strategic projects despite having no strategy, how is this possible?
The strategic label is attached to any initiative as a desperate attempt to make it stand out among the to-do list and devote the time for something exciting.
But still we are talking about projects and not strategy. And how these relate to each other and contribute synergistically to bring results is often indecipherable.
Strategy is confused with planning, which is why meetings become boring and sometimes even annoying.
When you mix strategy and project management, you end up finger-pointing about who didn’t do what rather than converging on precisely defining what it is important to achieve-qualitatively and quantitatively-to position the company in the best possible way in the marketplace.
Strategic work is difficult and we are not used to it
Planning allows us to stay in our comfort-zone because it involves nothing more than deciding what to do and when to do the activities by selecting from the list those under our direct control.
Strategy is one of the most uncomfortable activities to do because there is no way to know in advance whether it will work. The only way is to implement and measure.
This is where strategy and planning come into contact: while remaining separate, they reinforce each other.
The strategy is executed through a sequence of planning initiatives that holds true as long as the logic behind the strategy remains confirmed by the data.
Planning without strategy leads to blindly executing projects that may have no impact except to consume resources.
The strategy without reverse planning leads to no confirmation of any of the hypotheses.
Remember: the only foolproof strategy is the one that is not executed!
Strategic work is undervalued
Good managers force employees to account for the hours that were sold to the customers who paid for them.
But who pays for the hours to be spent on strategy?
People feel empowered to work on something that is related to a direct effect with the company’s production. Smarter tasks, emails, conducting unnecessary meetings–keeping busy to generate more work.
Strategy is unfortunately not a job, but a discipline that everyone should know for two reasons:
- strategy is not the responsibility of the CEO alone
- strategy is never just one strategy
It happens in large companies, but even more so in small ones in which ownership coincides with the CEO role, that the responsibility for creating strategy lies in one place in the organization. Strategy thus becomes a clumsy attempt to break the deadlock: “if you don’t do it, I have to do it!”
Increasingly common in companies is the position of Chief Strategy Officer, who is responsible for creating, coordinating, and making strategy consistent across the company.
This is an important task for the second reason I mentioned a few lines ago: there is no single monolithic strategy, rather there are numerous micro-strategies that must be orchestrated simultaneously, and this requires very important coordination work.
Strategic work has obsolete tools
Have you ever seen what presentations coming straight from the CEO look like? Let’s face it: spreadsheets and unreadable presentations do not make this vital activity for any business sexy.
I founded STRTGY with a mission to make strategy work the most energizing activity of any leader through new tools to map, simplify, execute and measure strategy but most importantly give it back to people.
At MAKE PROGRESS with OKRs there are 13 tools for moving from theory to action, I invite you to have a copy on your desk or attend one of our workshops to experience their effectiveness.
