(First in a short series on strategy.)
Strategy is a word that engenders strong opinions. It gets used in a dozen contexts and takes on a different meaning in each one. It’s taught in business schools. It’s thrown around in every conference room. In plain conversation it usually just means “what we’re going to do next,” or “the plan.” But what actually is a strategy?
At work you hear it both ways. When something goes well: “we executed the strategy successfully.” When something goes wrong, it turns up in the criticism — someone wasn’t told the strategy, or doesn’t know it, and their work is suffering for it. Are those two sentences even talking about the same thing?
I’m going to start this series with an admission: most of us don’t share a common understanding of what strategy is, and, just as important, what it isn’t. The concept stays slippery for most people in business, even very good ones. I’m also going to start from a simple position — a business needs a strategy, and that strategy has to be clear and genuinely understood by everyone in the organization for any of us to do our best work.
So before anyone can talk about their strategy, they have to get aligned on what the word even means. Over years of running companies I’ve watched teams use “strategy” to mean five different things in the same meeting, then wonder why nothing lined up. To be experts on our strategy, we first have to become experts on strategy.
I’d like you to become one with me. For some of this will be review; for some, brand new. I’ll lay it out over a short series, in bite-sized pieces, and I’ll borrow liberally from two people who’ve thought harder about this than almost anyone:
Michael Porter — the Harvard professor who, more than anyone, wrote the book on strategy (several of them). Widely regarded as the authority.
Kurt Verweire — of Vlerick Business School, whose framework helped my teams re-engage with what strategy actually meant for them and frame it in a far more useful way.
Next time: what strategy is, and, just as important, what it is not.
— Brent
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