Why don’t we have a strategy? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why don’t we have a strategy?

#81

Post by tootie » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:35 PM UTC

dchuk wrote: post #51

tootie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is that strategy is hard and frequently requires divestment. Your head of inbound marketing isn't going to tell you the company strategy should switch to outbound marketing so let's cut my team in half and throw away everything I've built. My company is suffering this right now. We're doing annual roadmapping and it's entirely a program plan. Our business has shifted over the past 5 years and now…

"Your head of inbound marketing isn't going to tell you the company strategy should switch to outbound marketing so let's cut my team in half and throw away everything I've built." 1) Some might, if they see other roles/opportunities for themselves in the event they do 2) Generally your example is a call their boss or another overarching leader would make, not someone within the system/strategy.

Yeah, my example is a bit reductive but some form of this happens pretty frequently. Especially when the high-level decision makers are relying on their reports to provide inputs to their strategy decisions.

Re: Why don’t we have a strategy?

#82

Post by vasco » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 7:37 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #78

I'm a strategic thinker. I have been, almost my entire career. I write software that lasts decades , and have authored systems that took ten years to mature. The issue is that I have almost never been allowed to express, communicate, or implement my strategies. "Strategic thinking" is an ego thing. Only "big bosses" are "allowed" to "think strategically." If those of us, down in the trenches, "dare" to think strategi…

Ok, you walked into Marketing and said "This is gonna be trouble". What would happen next? Was the person looking at you even able to decide anything about what Marketing was working on? When you foresaw this huge danger to your employer, ten years in advance, you didn't keep mentioning it to people, or if change companies to somewhere that you know, you don't have the knowledge that is gonna fail for sure due to your foresight?

Re: Why don’t we have a strategy?

#83

Post by phamilton » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:02 PM UTC

Re: Why don’t we have a strategy?

#84

Post by wahnfrieden » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:02 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #78

I'm a strategic thinker. I have been, almost my entire career. I write software that lasts decades , and have authored systems that took ten years to mature. The issue is that I have almost never been allowed to express, communicate, or implement my strategies. "Strategic thinking" is an ego thing. Only "big bosses" are "allowed" to "think strategically." If those of us, down in the trenches, "dare" to think strategi…

I suggest trying working with others as partner owners, instead of working in organizations of people who are compensated according to hours in seat

Re: Why don’t we have a strategy?

#85

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:11 PM UTC

vasco wrote: post #82

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #78

I'm a strategic thinker. I have been, almost my entire career. I write software that lasts decades , and have authored systems that took ten years to mature. The issue is that I have almost never been allowed to express, communicate, or implement my strategies. "Strategic thinking" is an ego thing. Only "big bosses" are "allowed" to "think strategically." If those of us, down in the trenches, "dare" to think strategi…

Ok, you walked into Marketing and said "This is gonna be trouble". What would happen next? Was the person looking at you even able to decide anything about what Marketing was working on? When you foresaw this huge danger to your employer, ten years in advance, you didn't keep mentioning it to people, or if change companies to somewhere that you know, you don't have the knowledge that is gonna fail for sure due to you…

> Was the person looking at you even able to decide anything about what Marketing was working on?

VP? Probably.

> When you foresaw this huge danger to your employer, ten years in advance, you didn't keep mentioning it to people

It only takes a couple of slaps to make us shut up[0]. They didn't want to hear from me, so I stopped trying to tell them stuff. Simple.

In this case, what I did, was start learning about the iPhone, and start doing coding on my own, once Apple allowed us into the system (They didn't actually publish the iOS API for a while). I actually wrote a number of apps that would have integrated our products with the iPhone, as the years went by, but ... you guessed it ... they were ignored. I considered them as practice.

I remember once, one of my Japanese peers saying "You know, I sometimes see something, and say to myself 'Chris mentioned this, like three years ago.'." But he never listened to me, at the time I was mentioning that. In fact, even after telling me that, he still refused to listen.

I knew the company was being steered into the rocks, and was not allowed to help correct the course, so I spent my time, preparing a lifeboat. I don't have to justify to anyone, why I stuck around. If I have to explain, they wouldn't understand.

Ego is a powerful force. We will utterly destroy ourselves, in order to salve our own insecurities.

> change companies

That seems to be everyone's answer, these days. I guess I'm stupid. I have not found it an attractive choice.

[0] "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow."

-Charles Browder

Re: Why don’t we have a strategy?

#86

Post by ralphb » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:12 PM UTC

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #21

How does NASA go about creating a strategy to land someone on the Moon or to build a space shuttle. this is something i'd really like to read about, and how they design for all the contingencies and things that can go wrong on a practical and hardware/software level.

That's interesting. My kneejerk reaction to your comment was "no, you don't have a strategy for landing a man on the moon, you have a mission architecture!". But on further consideration there really seems to be a lot of overlap between system architectures and strategies (in the Rumelt sense). Diagnosis, kernel, guiding policies. Seems to fit both domains.

Re: Why don’t we have a strategy?

#87

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:20 PM UTC

wahnfrieden wrote: post #84

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #78

I'm a strategic thinker. I have been, almost my entire career. I write software that lasts decades , and have authored systems that took ten years to mature. The issue is that I have almost never been allowed to express, communicate, or implement my strategies. "Strategic thinking" is an ego thing. Only "big bosses" are "allowed" to "think strategically." If those of us, down in the trenches, "dare" to think strategi…

I suggest trying working with others as partner owners, instead of working in organizations of people who are compensated according to hours in seat

This is true. I tried that, after the wheels came off my old company, but, you know, I also found out that us "olds" aren't particularly attractive in today's tech scene.

It's OK. I just stopped trying to work for others, and have been quite happy, working with people that can't afford to pay me.

Re: Why don’t we have a strategy?

#88

Post by lordnacho » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:35 PM UTC

danielvaughn wrote: post #71

dchuk wrote: post #14

The overwhelming majority of “strategies” are just rigid sequences of time bound outputs/shit you want to build, that always end up being wrong and needing to change because of new information coming in. Strategy needs to be: - We’ve identified this deep problem in the world that needs to be fixed - We want to bring the Vision to life where that problem is gone (a big bold future state of the world). - We believe bri…

A major component of a strategy is constraint. In other words, what are you going to give up? If you're going to do All The Things, that isn't a strategy, it's a wishlist. You have to bring constraints into the picture before anything like a strategy emerges.

This is exactly right, the most important thing that makes it a strategy is what we cut ourselves off from doing. If we're only hiring seniors, we don't get access to cheap graduates who can stay up all night. If we play a high line, we can't sit deep and wait for a counterattack.

The basic thing that makes a plan a strategy is it stops you from doing "the everything". A constrained menu of actions can still contain variability but it reduces the scope for total chaos that happens when you try to do absolutely everything.

It's quite possible that two opposing strategies can both work, but that allowing the team to do both at once will fail. That's called straddling. For example it's hard to appeal to exclusivity and the mass market at once, but businesses have done well doing one or the other.

Re: Why don’t we have a strategy?

#89

Post by nostromo95 » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:45 PM UTC

> A high % of the people in your company primarily care about vision, goals, and priorities. To them, that is a strategy.

Would be nice if the author defined what he thinks “strategy” is. It’s not obvious to me that the above is not strategy.

In general in business it seems the concept of strategy is whatever people need it to be in order for them to feel smarter than their coworkers.

Re: Why don’t we have a strategy?

#90

Post by hef19898 » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:53 PM UTC

mrhether wrote: post #76

hef19898 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which doesn't mean you can afford to have no plan at all. Because: "Failing to plan means planning to fail".

Such words ring true to everybody who has ever had a chance to experience failure. Proper time management is the key I would say and that's what it's good for and where it fails.

I also like that one: Proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance, the 7P.