Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1505694
AUGUST 2023 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 91 Matties: Since leaders often confuse strategy, goals, and missions, what's the process that they should follow to separate those out? In my broad experience, I oen come back to Richard Ronald's "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy." If you are going to chart a course for where you want to go, you want to make sure that you've got a diagnosis for explaining the nature of the challenge. You want to next have a guiding policy that's going to address the challenge. And then you want a set of coherent actions that are going to carry out the challenge. Shaughnessy: Where do companies start to go wrong when developing a strategy? Number one, they totally misinterpret or mis- diagnose the challenge. And that comes from the prevailing thinking about how you manage and how you perceive the world. You're always stuck in this Catch-22 loop where you'll never get the escape velocity to actually get where you want to go. I've seen some spectacular transfor- mations and failures, and some of the biggest failures were champi- oned by somebody in the executive suite. And there were literally people waiting to take their place and disman- tle everything. When the theory is not diffused, then you will continually run the threat of having expended a tremen- dous amount of money, time and energy try- ing to change things that will never change. I have a slide that I use to describe the sce- nario of leadership trying to implement change. It's a guy in a Darth Vader uniform standing knee deep in the ocean, with a Brita filter jug in one hand, and a two-liter bottle in the other. It's like one of those demotivational they're shedding a lot of lines of business that they consider unprofitable. And you wonder why and how that ever actually aligned with their original objective. ey're taking on a lot of mission creep and scope creep inside of the organization. And it's not yielding results. It's great to define strategy. But you have to have theory to actually shape what you're going to be pursuing things for. Just think about mergers and acquisitions. Why are you buying that business? For exam- ple, is it to acquire a technology? Have you considered how you're going to ameliorate the disparate portion, and which parts of the business to align so that they can become pro- ductive and learn how you work as an organi- zation? What are the things that you're doing right now that are perhaps alienating that effort toward the goals and objec- tives you're actually pursuing? I'm always at odds with how the term "strategy" is defined and used in the prevailing style of man- agement, because I oen find that it leads to some very signifi- cant flights of fancy. Leaders don't directly address the challenge that really faces the business, and they oen confound and confuse goals for strategy. ey're just statements of desire, as opposed to what you need to overcome. en as a consequence of that they're going to set bad strategic objectives. And they're going to fail to address the critical issues. For me, the critical issue, it keeps coming back to no matter what plan you want to put in action, if you haven't got a good theory to support how you're going to align the oper- ations of the organization, it won't matter. You're just biding time to the next round of layoffs.