For starters, it’s not the same as operational effectiveness.
Our latest research on transformations confirms that their success remains elusive and reliant on a holistic approach. Yet some actions are especially predictive of realizing the financial benefits at stake.
Strategy’ used to be the sine qua non of top management. But in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, it’s a catastrophically sluggish, constraining approach to sense making.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”. – Mike Tyson
Much has been said and written about how Nokia missed the smartphone revolution despite their supposed strategy of “Connecting People”. 1
And how Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed at the iPhone in 2007, then in a ‘strategic’ scramble, bought the rump of Nokia’s handset business for $7.2Bn in 2013 – an investment that dramatically missed the market, and was ditched two years later in a $7.6Bn write-off.
https://geoffmarlow.substack.com/p/from-strategy-to-sense-making
It’s a psychological dynamic called a “competing commitment,” and until managers understand how it works and the ways to overcome it, they can’t do a thing about change-resistant employees. by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey.
Every manager is familiar with the employee who just won’t change. Sometimes it’s easy to see why—the employee fears a shift in power, the need to learn new skills, the stress of having to join a new team. In other cases, such resistance is far more puzzling. An employee has the skills and smarts to make a change with ease, has shown a deep commitment to the company, genuinely supports the change—and yet, inexplicably, does nothing.
What’s going on? As organizational psychologists, we have seen this dynamic literally hundreds of times, and our research and analysis have recently led us to a surprising yet deceptively simple conclusion. Resistance to change does not reflect opposition, nor is it merely a result of inertia. Instead, even as they hold a sincere commitment to change, many people are unwittingly applying productive energy toward a hidden competing commitment. The resulting dynamic equilibrium stalls the effort in what looks like resistance but is in fact a kind of personal immunity to change.
https://hbr.org/2001/11/the-real-reason-people-wont-change
Many strategy execution processes fail because the firm does not have something worth executing.
The strategy consultants come in, do their work, and document the new strategy in a PowerPoint presentation and a weighty report. Town hall meetings are organized, employees are told to change their behavior, balanced scorecards are reformulated, and budgets are set aside to support initiatives that fit the new strategy. And then nothing happens.
One major reason for the lack of action is that “new strategies” are often not strategies at all. A real strategy involves a clear set of choices that define what the firm is going to do and what it’s not going to do. Many strategies fail to get implemented, despite the ample efforts of hard-working people, because they do not represent a set of clear choices.
Many so-called strategies are in fact goals. “We want to be the number one or number two in all the markets in which we operate” is one of those. It does not tell you what you are going to do; all it does is tell you what you hope the outcome will be. But you’ll still need a strategy to achieve it.
https://hbr.org/2017/11/many-strategies-fail-because-theyre-not-actually-strategies
Deliberate and emnergent strategies mnay be conceived as two ends of a continuumn along which real- world str ategies lie. This paper seeks to develop this notion, and So?le bafsic issuies related to strcategic choice, by elaborating along this continuaitn various types of strategies uncovered in research. These includcle strategies labelled planned, entrepreneutrial, ideological, umZ1brella, process, uinconnected, consensuts anld im -posed….