Hey happy Monday!
I just got the news that the book has sold 500 copies in less than six months since its launch. If you put them on top of each other it would come a tower almost 6 stories high.
When you visualize the numbers and realize their size in the “real” world, it has a whole other effect. Unbelievable!
I can only say thank you to all the inhabitants of this fantastic skyscraper and the next ones to join. There is room for everyone!
If you have not yet requested your copy you can do so now. Click here to purchase the book at a community-only price and gain immediate access to the tools while waiting for the hard copy book to arrive in your hands.
If, on the other hand, you just want access to theOKR Toolkit click here (you may decide to purchase the book at a later date). You will find 13 tools including spreadsheets and Miro boards, constantly updated and ready to use, that will help you build an efficient business growth system based on the OKR methodology.
Did you know that even if you bought the book elsewhere, if you spent at least 50 euros on Amazon, you can write a review? Visit this link to leave your review and help create this movement that you are a part of! The whole community will be grateful.
⤴⤴⤴
Micro-Strategies and Strategic Vectors
It is facile to read an article, or to comment on launch events, to think you understand the company’s entire strategy.
A very funny video has been circulating lately that seems to sum up very well the strategy of Google, and frankly of any company right now. It is a montage of Sundar Pichai’s speech at the recent Google I/O in which there are only two words. Guess which ones? “AI” and “Generative AI.”
What you are seeing is the result of long coordination and planning work by hundreds of teams, certainly not a last-minute effort to chase the trend.
When new products come to market, teams are already at work-perhaps for years-on the next new thing, and these efforts are within a much larger design that is difficult to decode from the outside (often even from the inside). It is in these details that the quality of a strategy is expressed.
To think of understanding strategy simply from a slogan is reductive. In doing so, we should simply say that Facebook’s strategy is to build the Metaverse and SpaceX’s strategy is to go to Mars… These are marketing messages and have little operational relevance other than to polarize the attention of the public and shareholders.
The same thing happens when we work on our strategy.
The point is that there is not, and can never be, a single monolithic strategy.
At any given time, the company is exposed to pressures from all sides. HR, Supply Chain, Safety, Marketing, Innovation, Product, Sales–each of these teams faces specific situations with different resources and outcomes.
That is why, internally, it is more correct to speak of many Micro-Strategies that are well coordinated by a clear, precisely communicated and, above all, understood (although it does not necessarily mean shared, but that is another story) vision.
Teams move independently, collaborating, and the goal of good orchestration is to make sure that everyone gets to the same destination at about the same time despite having to travel different routes.
A Micro-Strategy contains the directions that a specific team must follow to achieve a set of results consistent with the overall strategy.
It is an important concept that applies to both a micro enterprise and a large organization.In Make Progress there is a very important exercise that serves precisely to identify what the strategic vectors are for each team. It is the Now & Next and usually teams working with STRTGY perform it as early as the second week of the implementation program and in any case not before they have identified the mechanics of their growth: the Growth Machine.
The leaders of each team work together to define how they will need to adapt their ways of working to support the various areas of growth. They also provide a numerical assessment so they have clear priorities to focus on in the next cycle.
In the screenshot above, I have graphically highlighted the Micro-Strategies for team 1 and 2. The height of the bars in the graphs represents the Strategic Gap and is the main parameter for prioritizing resources and correctly assessing results.
If there is one place where strategy is expressed in detail and unambiguously, this is surely it, and in each definition each team finds the seed to write precise and powerful OKRs that cycle after cycle make the organization stronger and better aligned.
This is the first point where the rubber meets the asphalt.
Where strategy meets execution.
I hope I have lit a spark!
Let me know whether or not you found this note useful and if you have ideas you would like to explore further or questions that need to be answered. Just reply to this email.
Have a great week,
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS ⤴
-Antonio
Two ways in which STRTGY can help you
1 / The Growth Machine Workshop
Let’s work together on the mechanics of your company’s growth. The first available date is Monday, May 29 from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m.
Do any of these phrases sound familiar?
“I don’t have time to think about Strategy”
“My team is not clear on what to do”
“Processes are unstructured, everyone is navigating by sight”
In 90 minutes of intense and structured work you will achieve
- Clarity on goals and priorities
- Simplification of activities
- Focus and alignment of teams
- Construction of OKRs 10× faster
Consider participating, alone or with your team.
Visit this page with all the info.
2 / Adopt OKR-based business growth system in the next 12 weeks (or less)
Launch or restructure the next OKR cycle under my guidance. There are several options for working together but the first step is to meet in a short call to see if the requirements are there and what results are realistic to achieve.
I will be extremely direct and at the end of the call you will have a detailed understanding of next steps. I have created a special calendar that can be reached at this link.
Choose the best time to meet with me when you are ready.
