How to Think Strategically. Greg Githens
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provide a useful deepening of understanding about the source of the strategy. For example, the Moneyball strategy did not spring into Billy Beane’s mind fully formed. Billy Beane was exposed to sabermetrics ideas years earlier by his predecessor general manager at Oakland, Sandy Alderson. Going back further in time, sabermetrics approaches predated the events in the movie by at least 20 years. If Billy Beane was the father of the Moneyball strategy, Alderson was its grandfather. Bill James, who started writing about baseball statistics in the 1970s, was its great-grandfather. Like many other innovations, much time passes between the initial development of a good idea and that idea’s fully realized benefits.
Are You Strategic?
Many people have been told in their performance reviews, “You need to be more strategic.” With a definite tone of frustration in their voices, they ask, “What do you mean be more strategic?”
The phrase be more strategic likely was not meant to invite the person to participate in developing enterprise strategy. The speaker more likely intended it as an instruction to enlarge one’s perspective, to be less absorbed in their specialized daily work, and to coordinate their efforts with the efforts of others, including sacrificing their personal efficiency to serve the broader interests of the organization.
Strategic things ought to be connected to strategy and not status.
In this sense, a person who is more strategic holds a more systematic view of the organization and its fit with the external environment. She has learned the structures and disciplines that characterize her organization and its context of stakeholders, suppliers, regulators, and the like. With this knowledge, she is able to more adroitly coordinate her activities with others.
As an adjective, the word strategic is often used as a decoration – for example, strategic leadership, strategic plans, strategic decisions, and strategic markets. Mostly, when people use strategic as an adjective, they are signaling their opinion of the importance of the noun being modified. Used this way, the adjective strategic is self-indulgent, and many people use it to advance their personal status within the organization.
Most organizations have too many strategic things, a cacophony of goals and aspirations in competition with each other. The indiscriminate use of the adjective strategic adds to the ambiguity and doesn’t reduce it. Ideally, the adjective strategic should link to the organization’s strategy, and ideally the organization’s strategy should be good and not bad.
Emptying the Mind of Preconceptions
The knowledge and experience that have served you well in the past might anchor you to no-longer-relevant stories and conventions, causing you to neglect new learnings. Your intuition might make you complacent.
Adopt the ideas of Shoshin as a preferred approach to learning to think strategically. Shoshin is the Zen Buddhism concept of encouraging a beginner’s mind, which is a mindset that resembles a child who is discovering something for the first time. Your beginner’s mind is enhanced when you:
• Let go of rigid distinctions of what is right and wrong
• Eliminate expectations of what will happen
• Fill yourself with curiosity to understand more deeply
• Open yourself to new possibilities
• Ask simple questions
• Are open to possibilities
To learn to think strategically is not an exercise in rote memorization. It’s not stuffing your memory with a stack of facts about strategic frameworks and best practices. Instead, you cultivate an enthusiasm for the undiscovered and novel. You’re optimistic that someone can find a better way of doing things, and you know that step jumps can be better than incremental improvement. Start by emptying your mind of preconceptions and recognize the presence of ambiguity.
This chapter has introduced you to several important ideas about the nature, purpose, and scope of strategic thinking. It started with the underappreciated presence of ambiguity and concluded with a call for Shoshin. Along the way, I defined several essential concepts relating to competent strategic thinking.
In the next chapter, I more closely examine ambiguity as it affects strategy, goals, and plans. I take Chapter 1’s explanation of strategy as the inter-relationship of ends, ways, and means and use that to explain cleverness and to distinguish goals and plans from strategy. Finally, I examine the crafting of strategy and review a written statement of Oakland’s Moneyball strategy.
* There are many schools of thought on strategy. This definition of strategy is consistent throughout the book and coherently supports a model of strategic thinking as an individual competency.
† The movie captures the essential narrative of the use of Moneyball as a strategy, although it does deviate from the book in many important ways. My paraphrasing combines the events from the movie and the book.
‡ SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
§ We use the word trope in the sense of a common and over-used theme or tool of rhetoric.
CHAPTER 2
Cleverness
Strategy is a Crafted Approach of Fitting Resources to the Nuances of a Situation
Hope is not a strategy.
— Vince Lombardi
IT’s NATURAL TO SAY, “This is a clever child,” and less natural to say, “This is a clever adult.” The word clever implies that a person is creatively leveraging her resources to gain an advantage over a rival. With that characterization in mind, consider these three statements:
• The Oakland A’s had a clever strategy.
• The Oakland A’s had a clever goal.
• The Oakland A’s had a clever plan.
To what extent does each statement make sense to you? For me, the first statement is perfectly sensible because Oakland’s players were undervalued by others, yet they were configured in a way that led to sustained high performance. On paper, Oakland’s team was unexceptional. But despite their apparent weakness, they generated a superior record of competitive performance.
The second statement associating cleverness with goals seems odd, maybe nonsensical. This reveals a profound obstacle to good strategy and competent strategic thinking, which is people’s tendency to confuse goals and strategy.
A strategy can be good and clever, or bad and stupid.
The third statement is subject to the ambiguity of the word plan, which people often use to mean a coordinated approach to the challenge. The strategic-thinking narrative of Billy Beane reveals that he was curious about the potential of sabermetrics, skeptical of the intuitions and habits of baseball scouts, and willing to experiment to discover better methods of acquiring and using resources. Considering those elements, it’s appropriate to declare that Oakland had a deliberately conceived, clever plan.
People sometimes use the word plan in the literal sense of a document. Many strategic plans are wish lists of the organization’s goals and objectives. The authors often add graphics of favorable trends and pictures of smiling people and soaring eagles to create an illusion of achievement. Too often, they neglect the essential issues and choices for the organization.
Cleverness as the Integration of Ways, Means, and Ends
In Chapter 1, I shared the U.S. Army’s definition of strategy