Strategy is not X • Hacker News Board

Re: Strategy is not X

#41

Post by doctor_eval » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 12:45 PM UTC

mattbuilds wrote: post #37

doctor_eval wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It’s crazy how many senior people don’t understand strategy and can’t deal with complexity. Ex, I once worked at a company that required creation of a two sided market (buyers and sellers). I proposed that we bootstrap the market by creating a variant of our product to enter an existing, complementary market. By offering a cheaper solution in the complementary market with clear benefits for users, its likely…

My theory is that people have been trained and rewarded for being “not wrong”. Strategy requires you to take a stance and get specific. Sometimes the strategy will not work. I think we need to do a better job of encouraging this sort of thinking. I don’t remember where I heard but it was something along the lines of “we tell kids they can be whatever they want and then actively discourage them when they take the nece…

Yes, I like this comment a lot. Any true strategy will need to have a specific outcome, and therefore can fail if the outcome is not reached.

On the other hand, if you (or in my case the CEO) listen to any one of the thousand consultants who will tell you that, say, advertising on social media is a guaranteed path to sales, you can’t ever be wrong because you’ve implemented - as you say - “best practice” and “proven techniques”; you did your job but “for some reason” - externalities - it didn’t work. There was no strategy involved, but we don’t need to talk about that.

This kind of thinking drives me nuts.

Your theory also helps explain why people buy Exchange, or JIRA, or IBM in the olden days.

Re: Strategy is not X

#42

Post by lordnacho » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 1:21 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #34

lordnacho wrote: post #22

Someone else mentioned Mintzberg, well worth a read. It will shatter many folk theories of what strategy is. Having said that I'll give a vague answer. Strategy is consciously deciding on one policy while sacrificing another. If we play a high line, we can't low block around the penalty area. If we press like mad, we can't conserve our energy. If we play the tall guy up front we are committing to crossing the ball, n…

So all those things sound tactical to me, they wouldn't persist from game to game or even session to session. You would need to adjust them according to your opposition. Whereas strategic decisions would be about how you select your players or how you balance players fitness against their freedom to do what they want. Stuff that would transcend individual games or even seasons.

That whole tactics vs strategy thing is IMO a red herring, it's an attempt at creating a distinction where none exists.

You have policies that are exclusive of other policies, sometimes they are quick to change, sometimes they are longer commitments.

Re: Strategy is not X

#43

Post by petewailes » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 1:27 PM UTC

m12k wrote: post #27

ajb wrote: post #10

Interesting that he's not sure what a strategy consists of after reading the book. I read the same book and it does give a definition, with three essential parts, but frustratingly doesn't then link the examples back to show how they illustrate the definition. Rumelt says good strategy consists of: "1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming…

Thanks for referencing that. Maybe it's semantics, but as someone coming at this from a game design perspective, 1 and 2 are clearly strategic, but I'd have said 3 is tactical rather than strategic. Tactics are the mid-level actions/subgoals that are used to implement a strategy. You can have a strategy without tactics - though usually you will need them in order for the strategy to succeed.

Actions and tactics in this sense are different. An action at a strategy level might be "cull products not aligned with a focus on the athli-leisure market" or "create a new line of footwear positioned around the fashion tastes of the West Coast market", or "investigate new formulations to reduce reliance on lithium".

They're not tactical - no-one has yet made a decision on how those things will be done, or what elements of the business will enact them, or what the management and operational implications will be and how they'll be dealt with.

It's a level of abstraction above tactics.

Re: Strategy is not X

#44

Post by icegreentea2 » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 1:49 PM UTC

tgv wrote: post #35

etempleton wrote: post #30

It always shocks me how many leaders struggle with what a strategy is in the business world. Typically, as the author mentions, they either present a goal, “XXX sales in Q1,” as a strategy or a checklist of tactics or actions. A strategy can be as little as a sentences or an entire plan, but it should be formalized. It is the “why” question. It answers the question of why you have people doing the things they are doi…

Isn't strategy the answer to the how question? Why is usually called "vision", even though in many cases it amounts to "making money with the tools and knowledge we have."

From a top down perspective, strategy is a how. As you say, it is how you accomplish your vision. But from a bottom up (implementation) standpoint, it can also be a why. Why are you doing these particular actions? As part of the strategy to accomplish the goal.

A well articulated strategy acts as a linking layer between ultra-high level goals and lower level decisions. We don't expect all actors in a large enough organization to re-derive all of their plans from first principles (nor do we want them to always do that), so a well defined strategy is essentially a pre-determined framework to operate in.

Re: Strategy is not X

#45

Post by k__ » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

ajb wrote: post #10

Interesting that he's not sure what a strategy consists of after reading the book. I read the same book and it does give a definition, with three essential parts, but frustratingly doesn't then link the examples back to show how they illustrate the definition. Rumelt says good strategy consists of: "1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming…

Thanks, I bought the book now.

Re: Strategy is not X

#46

Post by mattbuilds » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

doctor_eval wrote: post #41

mattbuilds wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that people have been trained and rewarded for being “not wrong”. Strategy requires you to take a stance and get specific. Sometimes the strategy will not work. I think we need to do a better job of encouraging this sort of thinking. I don’t remember where I heard but it was something along the lines of “we tell kids they can be whatever they want and then actively discourage them when they take the nece…

Yes, I like this comment a lot. Any true strategy will need to have a specific outcome, and therefore can fail if the outcome is not reached. On the other hand, if you (or in my case the CEO) listen to any one of the thousand consultants who will tell you that, say, advertising on social media is a guaranteed path to sales, you can’t ever be wrong because you’ve implemented - as you say - “best practice” and “proven…

People want all the rewards with none of the risk. But what’s funny is they are still taking the risk of failure. It’s more that they can fail and shift all blame away by saying “we did it all right, it just didn’t work”. It’s easier than doing the work themselves.

I just think we would all be better off if we told people it’s OK to try and fail, as long as we learn from those failures. We need to support people trying new things. If we just follow prevailing wisdom, we can only tackle problems that are already solved.

Re: Strategy is not X

#47

Post by pixelmonkey » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 2:42 PM UTC

I can't remember where exactly I read it, but it stuck with me. "In business, strategy is what you are doing that your competitors aren't doing." This struck me as a pretty good and succinct definition.

If you are just doing what your competitors are doing, you have no strategy, which is about right.

For example, Netflix's strategy in its early days against Blockbuster (well documented in the book "7 Powers") was to not charge for late fees and to have awesome web-based movie recommendations. These were two key things they were doing that Blockbuster (and every other DVD rental store) wasn't doing. The "no late fees" thing is a particularly awesome strategy since it "counter-positioned" against Blockbuster's main profit center.

Eventually, Blockbuster copied this strategy, but by then, it was too late, and, Netflix had shifted its own strategy toward, "Build the website from which everyone streams movies, remove the need to physically mail or pick up DVDs altogether." Even today, that strategy has been copied (Hulu, HBOMax, etc.) so their new strategy is, "Develop original Netflix movies/shows and the best overall catalog of movies/shows of licensed content, and have ubiquitous apps that work the same exact way on every device."

As you can see, all of these are strategies... and they are likely ones that opinionated executives like Reed Hastings had a say in. I'm sure many tasks, goals, and so forth for many different teams within Netflix fell out of these strategies at different times.

When a company is missing a strategy, they need opinionated and empowered leadership to shift strategy, sometimes painfully. But, that's not usually easy, especially when the company is historically successful on an old strategy, one which is no longer sound. When Netflix shifted from DVDs to streaming, it meant a lot of layoffs, and I'm sure many long-time professional relationships were soured by the experience.

It's also very hard for individual contributors in a large company to shift the company's strategy. But it's not impossible. Arguably this was the original thinking behind Google "20% time". A project like GMail shifted Google's strategy, but it came out of experimentation by engineers. Easier said than done, though.

Re: Strategy is not X

#48

Post by gompertz » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

mattbuilds wrote: post #46

doctor_eval wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I like this comment a lot. Any true strategy will need to have a specific outcome, and therefore can fail if the outcome is not reached. On the other hand, if you (or in my case the CEO) listen to any one of the thousand consultants who will tell you that, say, advertising on social media is a guaranteed path to sales, you can’t ever be wrong because you’ve implemented - as you say - “best practice” and “proven…

People want all the rewards with none of the risk. But what’s funny is they are still taking the risk of failure. It’s more that they can fail and shift all blame away by saying “we did it all right, it just didn’t work”. It’s easier than doing the work themselves. I just think we would all be better off if we told people it’s OK to try and fail, as long as we learn from those failures. We need to support people tryi…

And I think these comments summarize why consultants like Accenture, KPMG, McKinsey, etc survive today. They are for leaders who want to shift strategy risk away from their own responsibility. Whether a strategy succeeds or fails; consultants have a finite lifespan with the organization

Re: Strategy is not X

#49

Post by tamasnet » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 3:41 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #22

Someone else mentioned Mintzberg, well worth a read. It will shatter many folk theories of what strategy is. Having said that I'll give a vague answer. Strategy is consciously deciding on one policy while sacrificing another. If we play a high line, we can't low block around the penalty area. If we press like mad, we can't conserve our energy. If we play the tall guy up front we are committing to crossing the ball, n…

Which Mintzberg book(s) would you recommend?

Re: Strategy is not X

#50

Post by mavelikara » Sun, Mar 20, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

doctor_eval wrote: post #41

mattbuilds wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that people have been trained and rewarded for being “not wrong”. Strategy requires you to take a stance and get specific. Sometimes the strategy will not work. I think we need to do a better job of encouraging this sort of thinking. I don’t remember where I heard but it was something along the lines of “we tell kids they can be whatever they want and then actively discourage them when they take the nece…

Yes, I like this comment a lot. Any true strategy will need to have a specific outcome, and therefore can fail if the outcome is not reached. On the other hand, if you (or in my case the CEO) listen to any one of the thousand consultants who will tell you that, say, advertising on social media is a guaranteed path to sales, you can’t ever be wrong because you’ve implemented - as you say - “best practice” and “proven…

An aside - JIRA was a great product in it's time. It was free to use for any open source project. And many many open source projects willfully chose it, when there was no money involved.