Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
#2This is a nice and ambitious post. A few thoughts:
1. There are great insights in Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. The focus of that book is on Disruptive Innovation, where a new upstart with some new tech/angle crushes your business. A lot of your notes/principles here are captured in that book concisely.
2. One thing that is useful for employees to understand is how their company creates and executes on a strategy. It's crazy to me how many guides there are on strategy when most individuals do 0 strategy setting. The result is that you think of a great strategy, get shot down for whatever reason, and just grumble about how the "execs don't get it". It's much more fruitful to understand how the big dawgs are setting their strategy and what models they're using, and then you can figure out how to operate and innovate in that context.
3. Your comments on insight and research reminded me of Charlie Munger's talks on Mental Models. The basic idea is that you learn from a bunch of disciplines and your brain starts to tie things together and you'll produce insights. Shane over at Farnam Street (https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/) has a great guide and intro.
Overall, I enjoyed reading your post and am impressed by the level of research. Great job.
Re: Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
#3okay I have a system and structure..why am I not as successful as Henry Ford or Russell Simmons or Bruce D. Henderson. Luck plays a huge role, imho. The survivorship bias is huge. It's easy to review the winners and then work backwards to derive a 'theory', after the fact, as for why they were successful...it's like an interpolation polynomial.
Re: Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
#4okay I have a system and structure..why am I not as successful as Henry Ford or Russell Simmons or Bruce D. Henderson. Luck plays a huge role, imho. The survivorship bias is huge. It's easy to review the winners and then work backwards to derive a 'theory', after the fact, as for why they were successful...it's like an interpolation polynomial.
Paul, thanks for the comment and I agree with you: luck and timing are two external factors that have significant influence on the outcome, and strategists have little if any control over either. The only "counsel" I can provide is the idea of being as iterative as possible, and try to adapt / respond to the result (test => observe => refine). If you had $10 to bet on the same probability outcomes, rather than betting all $10 on one outcome, if you could play it by putting $1 on 5 outcomes and reserving the remaining $5 to double down on your highest probability winner, you're much better-positioned, statistically, to come out ahead.
Re: Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
#5This is a nice and ambitious post. A few thoughts: 1. There are great insights in Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. The focus of that book is on Disruptive Innovation, where a new upstart with some new tech/angle crushes your business. A lot of your notes/principles here are captured in that book concisely. 2. One thing that is useful for employees to understand is how their company creates and executes…
1. Good call-out. Agree and would strongly encourage anyone in this space to read Innovator's Dilemma.
2. Could not agree more with this (and have seen a lot of first-hand pain here). One of the biggest generators of employee anxiety is simple uncertainty, and uncertainty is a product of inadequate visibility into and/or understanding of how and why things are happening. That's again one of the reasons why I feel every org/team needs a framework like V2MOM, because that's a hierarchical structure for documenting and communicating a strategy in a way that gets employees participating in its development, execution, measurement and refinement.
3. +1 here too. I link out to the Farnam street post in mine.
Re: Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
#6okay I have a system and structure..why am I not as successful as Henry Ford or Russell Simmons or Bruce D. Henderson. Luck plays a huge role, imho. The survivorship bias is huge. It's easy to review the winners and then work backwards to derive a 'theory', after the fact, as for why they were successful...it's like an interpolation polynomial.
Paul, thanks for the comment and I agree with you: luck and timing are two external factors that have significant influence on the outcome, and strategists have little if any control over either. The only "counsel" I can provide is the idea of being as iterative as possible, and try to adapt / respond to the result (test => observe => refine). If you had $10 to bet on the same probability outcomes, rather than bettin…
For a mathematical treatment of this situation/concept see the Multi Armed Bandit problem.
Re: Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
#7A really great overview of the topic.
One thought on the building blocks summary - I would add an Ideation phase after the Insights phase or somehow mention the importance of ideas. The current outline suggests strategy creation is a highly analytical process, when, in fact, it is both creative and analytical at the same time, and requires both sets of skills.
As a side note, you might want to check out the work of Victor Cheng who introduces a lot of McKinsey strategic tools in his book and video series. Could be helpful for your future work!
Re: Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
#8Wonderful read. Thanks.
Few thoughts, In my opinion, leaders communicate the mission, vision and values, but never clearly communicate the strategy. The strategy for each department and team and it’s sub-teams with-in an org will be different. This has to be communicated at all levels to have the entire workforce work towards the single mission.
Many Startups are successful due to this.
Re: Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
#9Highly recommend checking out the podcast Exponent and the blog Stratechery, both by Ben Thompson. He is a great analyst and both Exponent and Stratechery focus on the intersection of tech and business strategy.
Re: Strategy: How to Develop, Structure and Shape a Winning System
#10okay I have a system and structure..why am I not as successful as Henry Ford or Russell Simmons or Bruce D. Henderson. Luck plays a huge role, imho. The survivorship bias is huge. It's easy to review the winners and then work backwards to derive a 'theory', after the fact, as for why they were successful...it's like an interpolation polynomial.
Paul, thanks for the comment and I agree with you: luck and timing are two external factors that have significant influence on the outcome, and strategists have little if any control over either. The only "counsel" I can provide is the idea of being as iterative as possible, and try to adapt / respond to the result (test => observe => refine). If you had $10 to bet on the same probability outcomes, rather than bettin…
And in a similar vein, you could use the Kelly criterion for how to optimally allocate your time/effort/capital.