Outside the Lines - The Business Edition

Strategy versus Tactical

A 2002 Harvard Business Review article, “Beware the Busy Manager” suggests that only 10% of us have the right combination of focus and energy that stops us wasting our time with “busy work” and keeps us in the sweet spot of the work that matters.

It’s a challenge that’s getting harder rather than easier, as our work life speeds up, we assume greater responsibility and things get more complex.

So how do you deal with this?

Get strategic. And then stay strategic.

Definitions

But what does “strategy” actually mean? I suspect it’s one of those words that gets bandied about without meaning very much, another corporate “weasel word“ that contributes to long meetings, vague documents and people working very hard on the wrong things.

So here are three definitions I like and occasionally use. I’d consider them to be both true and not the whole truth:

==> Our best guess at the future

==> What matters

==> What we say No to

(I’m sure there are alternative definitions - share yours on the blog in the Comments below.)

Easy to write. Easy to say.

And hard to start, yet alone maintain.

(My own coach, Ernest Oriente, sent me this cartoon which sums up the challenge nicely).

So here are three ways of approaching strategy that reflect the three definitions above - and may open up some new opportunities for you:

1. Create a picture.

I’ve found attempts to “get strategic” get lost down two different pathways.

The first is the way of the abstract pontification, high level ‘blah blah blah’ that everyone can nod their head to but few people are willing to pin down to meaning anything.

Or alternatively, there’s the pathway of minutiae, when an attempt to imagine the future gets confused with actually predicting the future and needs 100 or so slides to cover all the (largely erroneous and irrelevant) detail.

To keep from straying, it helps to realise that strategic thinking is a different type of thinking, a visual form of thinking. (That’s one of the reasons why people who are dyslexic are over-represented in the realm of successful entrepreneurs and leaders. Their need to understand information in a different way helps them, to literally see a different picture and forces them to be strategic).

Action step

Create a vision of what you (and your team) are trying to achieve. Not a bunch of words labelled vision. But an actual vision. Find 10 pictures that sum up where you’re heading and what success looks like (draw your own; rip them out of magazines; find them on a picture library like iStockPhoto.com). Then reduce them down to the five that are the most powerful.

Then think (and talk and draw and…): What are the three most important things we can be doing to help get us to this vision?

A useful resource:

Find Your Great Work: Napkin-size solutions to stop the busywork and start the work that matters.

Coming in September, this book is all about creating pictures to help you get a new perspective on what matters.

You can register for some cool pre-publication specials here.

An alternative resource:

If you’re looking for inspiration to get visual, then Presentation Zen is full of brilliant tips, tricks and role models for more powerful presenting skills.

2. Work out who matters.

In most strategic conversations, the focus is on collating and shaping the tasks - adding a little here, pruning a little there.

Which makes many of these conversations less about strategy and more about task-shuffling.

Start with a different conversation. Start with: Who matters?

In fact, as you become more senior in an organization, you start to realise that this is one of the critical conversations. It comes about because seniority means gaining influence … but also, as you’re no longer doing it all, losing control. And your influence lies in the invisible web of relationships you have. Your ability to be strategic is entangled with people and only then played out by completing tasks.

You can’t be everything to everyone. In fact, to be effective you’ve got to start making some choices about what you’ll be to whom.

So stop the doing for a moment. And turn your attention to the interacting.

Action step:

Who are the three internal people who matter most?
What do they want? What does that tell you?
Who are the three external people (or groups of people) who matter most? What do they want? What does that tell you?

A useful resource:

Get Them On Your Side by Samuel Bacharach is a great little book one of my readers recommended to me. As the title suggests, it helps you get a little smarter about who you need to build relationships with - and how to go about it. It presents a number of core strategies that will work with a range of different people.

An alternative resource:

Find the person in your organization who you think is the savviest, who has the best people relationships. Look broadly: it may well be the guy on the front desk or it might be the VP of Sales - or anyone in between. They know who matters and why. Take them out for a coffee, tell them what you’re trying to achieve and ask them: who do you think I should get to know?

3. Start saying no.

Quite possible my favourite coaching question is this one:

If you say Yes to this, what are you saying No to?

Its power lies in the fact that it makes explicit the choices that are being made. And stops people just saying Yes, one of the curses of modern business.

Don’t take my word for it

Read what smart people thinking out loud have to say about strategy here.