Strategy — What I think it is
Last week I sat through what may have been the worst presentation to a Board I’ve ever seen. Whether it was to bosses, company executives, or formal Boards, I’ve never seen something so disjointed in my career.
After the presentation, and tough Q&A that followed, I sat down with the CEO and we talked about what went wrong. I told her, quite simply, none of what she and the team presented made sense, at least not to someone not deeply involved day-to-day. She responded, “But we just presented all the stuff we’ve done over the last quarter and most of it was committed to at the last Board meeting.” And I said, “Therein lies the problem. You just presented all the stuff you did without any context; no “why?”.” From there, we moved on to talk about essentially what follows here, a simple way of defining “strategy” that can help align all the ‘stuff’ and give reason to the activities.
This discussion was originally used as inspiration for a strategy workshop with one of my leadership teams.
When I researched “What is Strategy?”, most articles have, in the first or second sentence, “Well, there are many different definitions of strategy…” And it’s true. There are many definitions. Some more complicated than others. My goal was to find something I can use.
So among the different definitions and opinions, I found something that speaks to me. A definition that has merit and, I think, is usable:
Strategy is an integrated set of actions to . . .
Why do I like this definition? Well, it’s simple with three easy mental triggers — integrated and actions. Integrated reminds me that what we want from a business strategy is to have alignment, to have coordination, to have all the resources of the organization focused and working together. Essentially, that all the priorities are the same and the direction is the same. All together on the same bus.
Actions, really tells the tale of strategy. We build a strategy so we can get to action; to get moving! We don’t want a strategy just for the sake of saying we have one. We want one to give us direction and a basis for how we spend our time and resources.
It is intentional that I leave the end of the definition open. This is because I think there is some customization required for each application or “to each his own”. What I mean by that is, if I were to write the following (note, paraphrased from another example I found) “Strategy is an integrated set of actions to gain a competitive advantage by exploiting core competencies in specific product markets.” Huh?
Maybe that’s too vague or too ‘corporate’ (even for me); maybe someone here just wants to think, “Strategy is an integrated set of actions to maximize our business”. That is probably aligned to “maximize corporate value” or something, but more specific. You can finish this sentence as you like.
At the end, it doesn’t matter which words are chosen to close the definition, but what is important is the third trigger, the “to do” something. Strategies aren’t made to achieve some random outcome. What we plan and do must be purposeful.
What we have, then, is a planned and coordinated series of activities to achieve something(s). Simple and workable for me.
To jump back to the opening scenario, this last trigger is where the Board presentation fell apart. What was presented was a stream of consciousness list of actions; really just a bunch of accomplishments without any context. The information presented didn’t wrap-up that strategy definition.
The Board was unable to understand what the executive team was trying to accomplish; why they were “doing all this stuff.” The Board meeting collapsed during the Q&A into a disorganized discussion about why each of the actions taken was important. Through Q&A, the Board was trying to establish the “why?” and grasp the strategic direction of the executive team. A big miss for the leadership team during a critical transition period in the company. They needed to establish confidence in their plan with the Board on executing an important shift in company focus.
In closing my discussion with the CEO, I suggested she consider customizing this definition of strategy, to help clarify what she and the team are doing. It could look something like this: “Our Strategy is to do x, y and z so that we achieve a, b and c.”
It’s a short and sweet template that I think will help the CEO, internally, communicate with the team and will form the basis of the follow-on discussion with the Board.
Yeah, it’s simple and basic. I just don’t think communicating strategy has to be complicated.
