Strategy naturalization

Focus on being strategic and strategy will take care of itself

Discussion about business strategy tends to focus on formualtion and execution — how to make a strategy and how to implement it. There are lots of theories, frameworks and tools to help with production and execution of strategy.

Similarly, studies of company performance tend to emphasise the quality of strategy — whether it is good or bad and how effective it is against competition, especially when the company is an incumbent facing ‘disruptive’ forces in its competitive landscape.

However, important as these factors are, they neglect something more primary and fundamental: the ability of people in the business to be strategic in the first place. Being strategic precedes and extends beyond any single strategy or competitive threat. In fact the resason why successful companies remain successful, and others spectacularly fail, is not because they have the right or wrong strategy: it is because they are more or less strategic.

Take the famous examples of incumbent firms that went bust allegdedly because they failed to change strategy — like Blockbuster, Toys R US, Kodak, etc. Now ask yourself: why did they fail to change strategy? And who is ‘they’ anyway? And what exactly did ‘they’ fail to do that led to failure?

The leadership teams at these famous firms were not stupid or short of market intelligence to show them how their industries were changing and what new competition was emerging. And their strategies didn’t come into play by miraculous conception and take on a life of their own.

Individuals, teams, and collective organizations were responsible for making and changing (or not) these strategies. In other words it was people being, or not being, strategic, that made succeed or fail.

In practice, ‘being strategic’ means different things at different levels. Strategic people are strong conceptualists and continually look to form and test their ideas, taking others with them; strategic teams are transparent, diverse, capable of high levels of dialogue and making collective commitments; strategic organizations are adaptable and designed to allow information, talent and capital to flow to the most valuable opportunities.

There are many, many more aspects but the general point is that being strategic precedes strategy. By focusing on being strategic first, on strategy naturalization at the level of the individual, team and organization, then strategy formuation and strategy implementation become much easier and have higher probability of success.

The temptation is always to focus on the output — the strategy, the implementation plan, the results — and interpret what went right or wrong. But for every business strategy success or failure there is a group of people behind it who were, or were not, being strategic. Our advice is focus on that, and strategy will take care of itself.