part

one
Your strategic self
Strategy is about shaping the future. But even clever
planning doesnt always work in the real world. And thats
the reason for this book to help you to use strategy to
figure out what to do now to get what you really want
later. This book can help make strategy work more often.
There are strategy tools and processes that can help,
but the real heart of strategy is the strategist. Its
what you know, how you think, and how you get
people to care enough about what you are doing to
achieve your goals.
Its also about setting in motion the sequence of events
that will shape the future in a way that you like. The
more you understand the people who make events
happen and the connections between what they do and
those events, the smarter you will be.
You have already used strategy to get a lot of what you
have. You got a job. Or you got an education to get a job.
You might have saved money for a holiday or a home.
Maybe you romanced your partner, wife or husband.

You did something in the past to try and get something better
in the future.
Becoming a strategic thinker a strategist is about getting
better at shaping events. In the business world you need to
understand how strategy is usually done. You need to know
how to create strategy that convinces others to support you
(including your boss or shareholders). And you need to know
how to make strategy deliver success in the real world. Strategy
that works.
There is no guarantee that the future will turn out the way
you want. Just writing a plan does not mean that the plan will
happen. The world is more complex than our ability to plan,
but thats part of what an effective strategist learns to accept.
You learn that reacting and responding to events is just as
important as planning.
Some business schools and consultancies have sold the promise
that strategy can solve everything. In their hands, strategy has
become a cult that believes in the magical power of a few
models. They have weakened practical emphasis on the art of
strategy and left some non-MBAs wondering if there is any
room for entrepreneurial instinct.
Others have become cynical about strategy. They hear the
word and disengage. They expect bad or boring things to come
from any strategic planning process. They predict job cuts or
mindless changes. Or just expect meaningless waffle that is
incomprehensible in the real world. And there is some truth to
this view.
Yet we have been trying to shape our future for as long as we
have been human. It is in our nature to interpret our experience
to provide shortcuts for a better future. This is what strategy is
about and how it can be of value in the real world.

To become an effective strategist, you need to start with

yourself. Begin by understanding how one thing leads to
another. Get yourself an education in the basics of strategy
tools and models. Pay more attention to where you are, whats
happening around you, and how trends create opportunities to
get to where you want to be.

Shaping the future

Strategy is about shaping the future. Corporate strategy is about
shaping the future for an organisation. You use strategy to figure
out how to achieve your purpose and ambitions. You move
between where you want to go (ends) and what you need to do
to get there (means). Great strategy is the quickest route from
means to ends to shape your future.
Frequency Every problem, every opportunity!
Key participants The whole organisation.
Strategy rating Strategy6

The Cheesecake Factory has grown into a billion-dollar

corporation. Its recipe for success is based on a small number
of strategic ingredients. The founder created a unique concept
with the broadest, deepest menu in casual dining and the best
cheesecake he could make. They spend $2000 per employee
just on training to make sure people deliver the best customer
experience.
These are strategic decisions. They are not accidental,
although they did not all come from planning. They are
part of a strategic package. They shape the competitive
environment. They stop copycats. And they shape the future in
ways that are desirable and believable to investors, managers
and employees.

Objective
Shaping the future of an organisation involves every part and
everyone. Strategy considers things inside and outside the
organisation that will make a difference to its success. The strategist also looks for opportunities and threats to the future of
the organisation. Ideally these are explored with imagination,
ambition and a creative understanding of customers, products
and resources.

Shaping the future

To shape the future requires a combination of thinking, planning

and reacting to events that emerge along the way. These provide
key strategy questions:

What do we want to do?

What do we think is possible?

What do we need to do to achieve our goals?

When should we react to new opportunities and adapt

plans?

What do we want to do?

This establishes a sense of what is desirable. Organisations tend
to have an overall purpose. Sometimes purpose is very precise
and deliberately agreed; sometimes the purpose of the organisation is very ambiguous. There may be many different opinions
about what the organisation is for and what it should do. These
opinions may conflict and compete with each other. This is all of
interest to the strategic thinker.

What do we think is possible?

This introduces some sense of practicality. You look at opportunities in the world contrasted with the resources that the
organisation either has or can obtain. But looking at opportunities can also expand a sense of what is possible beyond what
has been done in the past. What do the achievements of others
and trends in technology and consumer desires allow your
company to do next?

What do we need to do to achieve our goals?

This includes the necessary strategic moves to achieve the overall
goals of the organisation. It includes the style of leadership as
well as the structures and processes of the organisation, and the
projects, tasks, roles, products and services that have to be done
to achieve organisational aspirations. Ideally these actions work
together in some more or less harmonious way so that the
sum of actions is greater than their parts.

Your strategic self

When should we react to new opportunities and adapt plans?

Our views of the future are incomplete. When we write our plans
or decide on an overall purpose we dont really know what is going
to happen next. Small and big events will happen that challenge
the existing strategy. New opportunities will emerge that are bigger,
better or just different from those we thought of the first time.

Context
Shaping the future depends on context. You cant control the
waves of human desire and endeavour with strategy, but you can
create strategy that surfs those human waves, contributing to
them or benefiting from them. It follows that you need to understand the context for any attempt to create strategy.
There are probably some low competition, high stability markets
but it is safer to assume your strategy will face high competition,
low stability. So this book will make the same assumption and give
advice on strategy that can be effective in such a situation.
Each section answers questions that are needed to create a
strategy that can be used to shape the future. There are sections
that explain how to create strategy, think like a strategist,
win with strategy, make your strategy work, build a strategic
organisation and troubleshoot your strategy whenever it stops
working.

Challenge
A lot of organisations still set in motion grand plans to a better
future. The larger the organisation, even now, the more likely it
is that they have a strategic planning team who produce strategy
documents as a result of lengthy financial analysis.
This plan is then cascaded or passed down the hierarchy until
it reaches middle management, at which point it often disappears. The front line may have to work in structures, processes
or role descriptions that were designed as part of the plan. This

Shaping the future

planning, command and control approach often leads to out-ofdate strategy and out-of-touch leaders.
Some people argue it isnt even possible to plan because events
are so unpredictable. They claim it is better just to organise as
efficiently as possible. Then you just hope evolutionary market
forces (what people want and what people sell) will be a natural
fit to whatever you are doing.
The trouble with this evolutionary approach is that it doesnt
really address what you need to try and do to make it more likely
that your company is a natural fit. And thats why clever strategy
is somewhere between the extremes. It does try to plan deliberate
actions to shape the future, but it also tries to stay close to local
events and to react to them. In this way, strategy is transformed
into a learning process that becomes at its best smarter
through experimentation.

Success
Progress is made when the organisation moves towards a strategy
that learns its lessons and adapts to new opportunities. In this
way, you can benefit from strategic thinking that is clever rather
than one-size-fits-all strategy. You will also see people at all levels
more involved because managers are interested in what is really
happening at the front line.
Your strategy efforts will use strategic principles and tools to better
prepare the organisation for shaping the future. Your strategy
will craft a response to external waves, needs of customers and
actions of competitors. Your strategy will consider the nature of
the business (its purpose, style and products) and the ways that
it organises internal resources, processes and people.

Strategists measures of success

Understand (and apply) the main strategy questions.
Use the differences between planning, coping, adapting and shaping
covered throughout this book.

Your strategic self

Consider a wide range of internal and external aspects.

Accept the need to build a strategic organisation to achieve shared purpose.
Establish a flexible, continuous approach to strategy.

Pitfalls
Its important that efforts to introduce more strategy dont lead
to less strategic thinking (or worse results). There are lots of
naturally strategic people who see opportunities, see new patterns
and adjust the work of the organisation to take advantage of
these. Its also important not to simply replace one set of words
with another. The idea of strategic thinking is to improve results.

Strategists checklist
Remember that inward-looking planning is not sufficient

because of the high levels of external change and competition.

Work your way through the strategy questions (see page 167)

and answer them for your business. It provides a valuable

template for developing creative strategy that is straightforward enough for all sizes of business.
Understand the importance of a learning approach to strategy.

This means that as many people as possible are engaged with

strategy so that they can adapt what they do to support the
purpose of the organisation. And so that they can feed back
valuable information to their leadership team in order to adapt
the official strategy.

Related ideas
Howard Thomas and Taieb Hafsi offer a useful (although
academic) way of looking at what strategy is and whether it
matters. For them, strategy is a mixture of rules of thumb and
creative methods. It helps people understand and transform
reality. This means that strategy tools are only valuable if they

Shaping the future

stay close to reality. Some techniques are useful only for making
specific decisions. The most powerful tools will help people
navigate the process of shaping the future. Without this, strategy
is nothing.