Business Strategy

Plan, Execute, Win!

Patrick J. Stroh

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118893227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Embrace strategies for improving your business and reaching your organization's goals

" I wholeheartedly agree with Patrick Stroh: Good leaders understand strategy and good strategists need to be good leaders. Make this book a strategic tool for improving your business strategy." — Harvey Mackay, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive

In today's fast-moving and competitive business environment, strong leadership, insightful strategy, and effective innovation are critical links to staying ahead of your competition. Getting your business house in order can often be complicated, but does it really have to be? How do you take MBA 101 lessons, great models, and exceptional concepts and put them into play in the real world? Business Strategy: Plan, Execute, Win! strives to answers these questions in an educational and entertaining format. Working as a Fortune 20 practitioner with C-level executives, author Patrick Stroh has a keen understanding of the role played by current day strategists.

With 5 chapters following the format of "All I Ever Needed to Learn About Business Strategy I Learned..." At the Movies, On the Farm, On Shark Tank, On Hell's Kitchen, and From the Bible, readers will gain valuable strategic insight regardless of industry, business maturity, or current business turbulence and how to apply these insights based on the factors impacting their own business. Each chapter ends with a One Chapter Conclusion, Two Gold Nuggets the reader is to write down and Three Additional Resources/Tools for more information, offering a practical roadmap to simplifying your success.

PART I
LEVEL SETTING/FOUNDATION

Part I of this book is a baseline for Parts II and III. I will set some context and give a little perspective on how strategic planning needs and processes have evolved and what the role should be for a person who is responsible for strategy today. Many companies have created and hired positions now for chief strategy officers (CSOs). I myself was a chief strategy and innovation officer in a Fortune 20 company. I have some strong feelings based on experience regarding what this role should and shouldn’t be, and I discuss the rationale for my opinions in Chapter 1. I also believe CSOs must possess certain key traits to be successful, which are discussed in Chapter 2. As we get into this discussion on strategy, sometimes we find a negative connection around its success and usefulness. Consider the conclusions of a recent survey of 300 chief executive officers (CEOs). The key takeaway is that 72 percent of these CEOs believe that U.S. companies do a better job of developing corporate strategies than implementing them. The best military analogy I’ve heard that depicts this is: “The best strategy in the world can’t take the hill.” Translation: Strategy without execution is worthless. Creating a three-to-five-year strategy for a three-ring binder once a year that sits on your shelf is archaic. Creating a strategy that you in turn drive into actionable plans and goals with associated metrics is invaluable. Execution is everything. Great executors of business strategy create conditions where people:

• Know what to do—because accountabilities are clear.
• Know how to do it—because they have the right skills.
• Are motivated to do it—because they see how they are adding value to the organization.
• Have defined metrics—so they can consistently monitor and measure progress and results to make necessary course corrections and adjustments to achieve goals.
• Have regular management forums—so they can regularly vet problems, talk about changing competitive or market positions, or seek sage counsel from others on actions.

Now, in Part I, let’s take a quick assessment of where we have come from, where we are at, and how to move forward and learn from Part II.

Chapter 1
Evolution of Strategic Planning and Today’s Role: Chief Strategy Officer

Strategy without execution is a hallucination.

—Ambuj Goyal, General Manager, System Storage and Networking, IBM

A primary role that has become more prominent in the last two to three years is the role of chief strategy officer (CSO). In the past, this role primarily fell on the leader of the business, the chief executive officer (CEO) or president. It also could fall on whichever senior business leader did corporate development (i.e., mergers and acquisitions), as likely that person was best suited to know the market and what other competitors had for value propositions that he or she might want to duplicate or embellish and to understand specific market forces. Today, with a globalized economy, the incredibly fast pace of change, and an insurmountable supply of information, business strategy is not something you can work on the side while doing another primary role. Or can you? This chapter goes through a very brief history of business strategy and quickly gets to today’s CSO role and some perspective on what does and does not work in business strategy as we know it today.

Evolution of Strategic Planning

Strategic planning has certainly morphed over time. In contemplating this, think about decades of time versus years to look at trends and changes. One of the best articles I’ve read on this evolution was by Dr. Richard Oliver, who wrote “The Evolution of Business Strategy.” I include some of the main excerpts and metaphors that he uses because they mirror my own philosophy of using ideas-that-stick metaphors. It’s helpful to look through some of this history to try to predict what new megatrends and events will shape strategic planning and how we drive toward success.

Strategy as War. The word “strategy” is derived from the Greek word strategia, meaning “generalship.” For early commercial enterprises that moved beyond the family firm, business approaches often mirrored those of the military. The command and control models Army generals used moved easily into business practice with little alteration. Company heads commanded the troops while winning battles through sheer force (superior resources), because they had an impenetrable fortress (a protected market or monopoly), or via guerrilla warfare (going after competitors when they’re not expecting it). Some of these thematic elements still exist today. Many top executives regard Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, written more than 2,000 years ago, as required reading. The command and control model has been pervasive. Strategy was primarily centered on winning the war by eliminating competitors.¹

We know that a lot of how we organize and execute our businesses comes from the military. Think of the hierarchies and discipline utilized and required today. However, the days of one person being in charge and knowing all the factors and dealings in a business is gone. I’m not saying that there is not a head of a business—absolutely you need to have leader—but that person, today more than ever, needs to be a master orchestrator and organizer in pulling together the many aspects of a business in a globalized economy. While we still need to command and control, we need to do it in a more collaborative approach.

Strategy as Machine. World War II demonstrated that the winner was the one with the better “industrial machine.” Thus, the war metaphor gave way to a view of strategy as essentially an industrial process that, just like a factory, was largely mechanized. The prescribed approaches to strategy seemed to suggest (just as with a machine), “If you press this button or pull this lever, then such and such will happen.” With its new emphasis on mechanistic processes, the idea of strategic planning drew more attention in academic circles through the 1960s. Major corporations created strategic planning staffs and began to implement systematic planning processes. For the first time, strategy became a business process that was seen as manageable, in the same manner as other elements of the business. Many of today’s key terms and tools—as well as a number of strategy consulting firms—were developed during this period. Courses on strategic planning began to enter the business school curriculum in a limited fashion.

Strategy as machine assumes a cookbook approach: “If you do ‘x’ then press ‘y’ button, then such and such will happen.” This may have applied during a period of time, but obviously not today; life and business are just not that simple. Additionally, while there are some universal best practices on how to run a business, there is no singular, predefined path to success. There are too many other variables to consider, and after this part of time, post-World War II, the world has turned into an even smaller place. Information is readily available, the workforce no longer consists of the 30-year employees of the past, and older methods of success do not guarantee future success. If you depicted strategy as machine today, it would have to be a learning machine not unlike what you see in sci-fi movies that constantly adapt to their surroundings. Scary stuff.

Strategy as Network. The global shocks of the 1970s (escalating oil prices, war, government instability, and increasing global competition) illustrated the importance of flexibility, non-linear thinking (i.e., strategy was not simply an extension of current trends), and rapid communication in strategic thinking. Many companies burdened with a rigid planning process—or no planning process at all—suffered devastating consequences.

The 1980s saw the rise of Japan and its consequent effect on strategic planning theory and practice. The rapid advances in technology also had a dramatic effect, with the humble bar code turning inventory management upside down and the rise of enterprise resource planning (ERP) computer systems allowing managers to track widespread geographic activity in real time. Harvard professor and strategy guru Michael Porter wrote his most important works during this period and shaped several generations of academic and practitioner thinking about strategy. As the personal computer and advanced robotics became more widespread, productivity increased and managers gained a wider view of operations than ever before. The 1980s were a golden time in the history of strategy: The decade witnessed the start of global planning processes and corporate reengineering.

The 1990s were a boom time for the United States, which sealed its role as the dominant world leader. Strategic thinking was affected by the rise of the Internet, accelerating advances in technology of all kinds, and a striving for efficiency and low-cost production, putting the focus on a firm’s ability to “add and migrate value.” Strategic planning and continual revision became entrenched as a vital core of the corporation.

Strategy as network was important. It caused a realization that you could not be so inwardly focused on your own products and business as to ignore the market, your customers, and your competitors. However, as the 1990s led to strategic planning becoming entrenched as a vital core of the corporation, it also led to some of today’s naysayers considering “strategy” a bad thing. As with anything good, strategy needs to be in balance and not overdone. Taking a good thing too far, swinging the pendulum too far to one side or another, can turn a strength into a weakness. Those corporations that put in large strategic planning departments and got buried in the administration of creating lengthy, inflexible plans drove leadership and strategy to a place of bureaucracy and low value added for the time invested. But at the same time, as noted, some of the best strategic planning models, like Michael Porter’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Level Setting/Foundation
• Part II: Parables that Teach and Portray Business Strategy
• Part III: Tools, Resources, and Conclusions
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement