The committee chair’s presentation was spectacular—a succinct yet thoughtful description of the committee’s vision, what the company needed to accomplish over the next two years, why such results were needed, what other groups with a similar mission were doing, along with a handful of very high-level actions (some innovative and some not) that were required to produce the company’s desired outcomes.
Wow, went my brain, she totally nailed the strategic direction. She described the broad view and coupled it with just the right amount of high-level specifics.
I’m nodding my head in agreement.
A gentleman sitting at the same table obviously reached a totally different conclusion. He quietly muttered to no one in particular, “What I want to know is where did they find this tactical bozo.”
“Why do you say that?” I whispered in his direction.
“If you have to ask, then you don’t understand strategic planning either,” came the dismissive reply. The gentleman shook his head at me, stood up, and walked away from the table. He took a seat across the room.
Holy smokes, that was a fascinating reaction. One that made me wonder if I didn’t know as much about strategy as I thought I did.
Not wanting to spend too long in the “bozo corner” but interested in challenging my own reasoning and reactions to the woman’s presentation, I did research when I returned to the office.
I found fascinating information about the differences, similarities and outcomes of strategy work:
Strategy
- Wikipedia: “a word of military origin, refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal.”
- Exploring Corporate Strategy by Gerry Johnson: “…is the direction and scope of an organization over the long-term: which achieves advantage for the organization through its configuration of resources within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of markets and to fulfill stakeholder expectations”.
Strategic Planning
- Wikipedia: “an organization’s process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people.”
- Henry Mintzberg, Professor of Management, McGill University: “…at it has been practiced, has really been strategic programming, the articulation and elaboration of strategies or visions, that already exist.”
Strategic Thinking
- Rich Horwath, Professor of Strategy, Lake Forest Graduate School of Business: the “generation and application of business insights on a continual basis to achieve competitive advantage.”
- Henry Mintzberg: “…is about synthesis. It involves intuition and creativity. The outcome of strategic thinking is an integrated perspective of the enterprise, a not-too-precisely articulated vision of direction.”
Strategic Management
- Wikipedia: the “conduct of drafting, implementing and evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its long-term objectives.”
Strategy in general
A concept that resonated for me came from Fiona Graetz in which she distinguished strategic planning from thinking using divergent and convergent processes:
…a capacity for innovative, divergent strategic thinking rather than conservative, convergent strategic planning is seen as central to creating and sustaining competitive advantage
With all that to noodle, I settle on this take-away on strategy:
we have to help leaders create flexible structure and process so strategic action plans can be operationalized, and while all this happening, it’s important to also maintain openness of thought and creativity so the strategic plan can shift with changes as they occur or flex before changes occur.
What’s your take?
Image source: morgueFile.com
