Do you need a Strategy or a Powerpoint Presentation?
Do you think Genghis Khan had a town-hall meeting to discuss the agile approach to conquest? Or, how about an alignment meeting? Maybe he did, but we don’t know about any of them because we judge their strategy through their actions, not their presentation skills.
And this is the only thing that matters in the end — action. Point me to any master strategist (from Hannibal to Caesar to Napoleon) and I will show you a doer, someone who lets actions speak louder than words. It’s what separates successful leaders from second-place finishers. Those who are successful, first execute on strategy. The others mimic the strategic process but leave out the most important factor, actually doing something.
For example, the American General George Patton, hero in World War II for routing the German forces in France and driving them back into the Reich, was known as a man of action. He was also known for his poor public speaking and communications skills. If he were alive today, he might not make the cut because he’d probably be a bad PowerPoint presenter. He had a weak voice and was famous for making inappropriate public statements. Yet he was a genius on the battlefield.
Think about Ballmer’s Microsoft. According to the presentations and leaked memos, Microsoft was all about ‘services’. A services company goes for scale and market share because those service products become more valuable when more people use them. It’s the reason Facebook Messenger is more valuable than ICQ. But most of Micosoft’s services were Windows-only (an illogical restriction), which made us think their message was disingenuous or worse … that they cannot execute. After Satya Nadella took over from Ballmer, he immediately did something his predecessor shied away from. He released Office for iOS. Boom! All of a sudden shit got real. Since then Microsoft lived up to its services strategy. They did it by taking bold action, by implementing and executing strategies that were carefully analyzed, not by executive gibberish or fancy inspirational videos.
It might sound pretty self-evident but this obvious observation escapes most executives as they are trapped by internal policies. In so many cases strategy represents nothing more than a carefully crafted display of well-intentioned initiatives. Often, there is an absence of painful decisions (hard decisions are not intrinsically popular) in an effort to establish executive alignment. And since action is not part of the feel-good presentation what’s left of the strategy is a PowerPoint presentation. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with PowerPoint. Its use as the sole conduit of strategic thinking is the real culprit. Without any concrete hard actions resulting from the typical corporate strategy sessions, the slide-show is nothing more than a smoke screen to hide behind the status quo.
The rise of the slideshow strategy
It shouldn’t be surprising that this happened. As the western economy moved from production into the information age, so did corporate communications move from memos to carefully planned shows. Strategy stopped being a list of decisions which was fought and debated, behind closed doors, and then passed down the ranks where it was transformed into a showcase of entertainment. The goal moved from decision making to inspiration. No wonder most strategic sessions today look more like corporate versions of a TED talk than a real-debate.
In fact, the U.S. high military command at the Pentagon has been dealing with this this issue for quite some time. In 2010, a leading general stated that PowerPoint hindered critical thinking and masked shortcomings in strategic execution. General James Mattis, head of the Marine Corp stated bluntly “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” General Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in that Afghanistan, pointed to a ridiculously complex and incomprehensible PowerPoint slide and said rather tongue and cheek, “When we can understand that slide, we’ll win the war.”
Don’t get me wrong, inspiration is important. It helps everyone to see the bigger picture and to aspire to pursue a future that is eons away. But Inspiration is not the best way to get there. On the contrary. Inspiration is a manager’s code for ‘trying harder’. In the minds of lots of manager’s, inspiration is a magic elixir that makes employees go beyond mere dedication to become more creative, work longer hours, etc. The only problem is that it doesn’t work.
Strategy is made of action based on hard choices. But hard choices are not very popular. In most cases they are quite demoralizing:
- shut down products or shift resources
- firing people or closing underperforming offices
- raising more money to fuel growth in one area and diluting all shareholders
- focusing on certain customer types and firing a lot of the existing ones
- etc.
It’s easy to see how these things are not universally praised. It’s much easier to have a PowerPoint focusing on vision, bombastic mission statements, to be followed inevitably by ambitious goals, than it is to create goals that will require a burst of productivity to reach realistic (but hard) choices.
So next time you have to sit in a strategy session ask yourself, “What are we doing differently tomorrow than we are doing today?”. If the answer is not self-evident there was no strategy session. You just watched another feel-good PowerPoint presentation.
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