The ten minute strategist
“The dirty little secret of the strategy industry is that it doesn’t have any theory of strategy creation” (G Hamel, Fortune Magazine, June 23 1997, p80)
Strategy is the pinnacle of the manager’s art. So much so that most organisations do not permit lowly employees to develop strategy. It is something for the top team, their consultants, and possibly an up and coming senior manager with his eye on a board position. But if this is so, how did the top team develop its strategy skills? Or is it the case that strategists are born and not made, and that the corporate promotion programme causes the natural strategists inevitably to rise to the top? Yet if that is the case, why do top-level managers find strategy such a difficult concept to come to grips with?
The truth is that very little in our corporate development programmes prepares managers to become strategists. In fact, if you want to put a prospective senior manager on the spot, ask them for their general views on strategy. If you want to make them squirm more, ask them for their views on your overarching corporate strategy. And if you want to maximise their embarrassment, ask them to tell you what strategy actually is.
Worse perhaps awaits the up and coming senior manager who takes his strategy to the executive management team, especially if he has been drafted in from another company. Three minutes into a presentation, a stentorian voice bellows “That’s not a strategy! It doesn’t have a (fill in the blank here)”. It seems that very senior staff who are not actually capable of formulating strategy are easily able to identify what a strategy is not.
The confusion on the face of the unfortunate would-be strategist is a reflection, perhaps, of the confusion in the world of strategy study itself. Managers brought up in a particular school or theory of strategy are sometimes given extremely prescriptive rules about the format of a strategy, which might require a SWOT analysis, a Boston Matrix, a Critical Path, a Strategic Context, or something as mundane as a time-line or a budget. Differing schools have differing ‘must-haves’, but little reflection is needed to realise that none of them are actually essential to strategy itself. Sun Tzu, 6th century BC author of The Art of War is often regarded as the father of strategy, but none of these modern elements are to be found in his writing. Or consider a strategy game such as Chess, or even Risk. Strategy is essential for success, but very seldom would the successful game strategies be describable in any of the terms listed above.
The difficulties of even agreeing what strategy is have led many CEOs to conclude that only professional strategists should be allowed to create strategy, leading to the burgeoning industry of strategic consultants.
This author would suggest that, if we can teach chess to six-year olds, learning strategy should not be beyond the means of even junior managers. In fact, we would go so far as to assert that every human being who copes with the daily complexities of modern life is in some sense a strategist. Rather than burdening the would-be business strategist with an endless stream of strategy techniques and caveats, it is time to help managers identify their own strategic behaviours, and build on them.
In 1981 Ken Blanchard published ‘The One Minute Manager’. In 1989 Stephen R. Covey published ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’. These two seminal management books separately espoused the notion that what managers needed were not external techniques but internal habits. This author would not wish to put his work on the same level as Blanchard and Covey, but this series of articles will put forward the notion that strategy development can become a habit which can be learned right at the start of a manger’s career, and practised over and over again in real life situation so that, when faced with grand organisational strategy, putting thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of pounds (or dollars) at risk, he will have a set of skills which are as natural and reliable as an athlete’s muscles or a chess player’s intuition.
Why ten minute? We could advance the tendentious argument that being a strategist is ten times more demanding than being a mere manager, and therefore ten times as many minutes are needed. Actually, the truth is rather less grandiose. This series takes as its starting point the work done by Mintzberg, Ahlstrand and Lampel in Strategy Safari, which identifies ten academic and business schools of strategy which have emerged in the literature from Sun Tzu to the 21st century. Mintzberg’s ten is by no means the only formulation. Elfring and Volberda, for example, have reduced the field to just three schools. But this author feels that Mintzberg makes a better case and — crucially — does it in a way which is recognisable to proponents of the various schools, and which are easily identifiable in the literature.
This, of course, begs the question of why one should not merely read Mintzberg’s book and have done with it. Actually, we would recommend that everyone does read Mintzberg’s book — it is fairly short, and hugely entertaining. What it does not do, though, is put forward a strategy formation process which one could apply on a habitual basis. Perhaps Mintzberg had already had his fingers burned on that one — one of his earlier books, ‘The Strategy Formation Process’, is extremely long, and hugely dull, and left this writer no wiser at the finish than when he started.
The ten minute strategist, then, is a ten step process which takes in and exploits Mintzberg’s ten schools, using only techniques that the manager already knows, and doing it in a way which he can remember with a simple mnemonic. By making it a ten minute process, a would-be strategist can apply it to very small problems as well as very large ones — this is crucial, because it is not until thinking strategically becomes a habit that we have moved from ‘attempting strategy’ to ‘being strategists’. Facing a single problem with this approach, a manager can sketch out six entirely different strategies in one hour.
In this approach, we are looking for strategies which are agile, flexible, structured and memorable. Agile is about the speed with which the strategy can be changed, adapted or implemented. Flexible is about the ability to bend the strategy around new facts (not, as is all too often the case, to bend the new facts around the strategy). Structured is about applying the knowledge gleaned by computer programmers over the years, that a clearly structured system is easy to maintain and apply, and easiest to transfer to a larger team. Memorable is about this author’s conviction that the only strategy which counts is the one you can remember when you face a decision. This applies to organisations of thosuands of employees just as much as to a personal attempt to quit smoking or eat less chocolate.
For those who feel the need for a weightier and longer strategy formation process, the series will also look at how to make the most of ten hour, ten day, ten week and ten month strategy development processes. We would suggest that anyone looking for a ten year strategy development process is already looking for the wrong thing.