Madhukar Sabnavis: Strategy is execution

Discontinuity is increasingly becoming an organising principle of the global economy. Lacking production-oriented control systems, markets create more surprise and innovation than do corporations.

To meet the challenge of discontinuity and to perform like markets, a corporation must learn to change as rapidly as they do, without losing control over operations.

Four factors are responsible for this age of discontinuity.

1. It is the age of temptation with the growth of entrepreneurship and the easy availability of finance to start something new; competition in many categories is no longer restricted to international and national players. Competition is from both regional and local players.

New players often have nothing to lose and everything to gain "" and so tend to try new paradigms and rules. While they may not last in the long run, in the short run they often create disruption and chaos for existing players in the market.

Localised competition means often micro-marketing requiring national and international players to actually look at strategy and plans at a more "micro" level rather than at a "macro, national" level only.

2. It is the age of consumer democracy with more choices and options and less differentiation between brands, consumers have the right to choose between equals.

This is reducing loyalty levels and encouraging flirtation. And in this context, decision is often made on the basis of price, popularity and last experience. So consumers are getting more difficult to predict!

3. It is the age of the market place battle. Life was simpler in the 1980s when much of the marketing battle was played in the mind through the media to get consumers to change perceptions.

Today with growing temptation and consumer democracy, the battle is moving to influence behaviour in the bazaar to get shoppers to actually prefer your brand vs the others. Changing or managing perceptions is only the starting point.

4. It is the age of government deregulation. While change in this area is known to happen, the timing and speed at which it is to happen is fairly unpredictable and every deregulation brings with it a sea of turmoil into the environment.

In short, the truth is that everything that happens impacts everything else. Sergio Zyman quite poignantly said, "Anything that happens in the environment is going to change what consumers do and don't do. Consumers live in an ocean of information where the movement of each molecule affects all the others, and a good marketer should be like a whale swimming through the ocean, filtering for food in the water around it."

Modern day markets are driven by moment-by-moment challenges. The annual campaign/plan is long dead and even if it lives, it is only for ensuring that the numbers to be achieved are known.

Strategy no longer is a fixed plan for a fixed period of time. Long term needs to be viewed as a summation of a number of short terms. There needs to be an overall master plan that charts the broad path but is flexible enough to allow for mini-strategies to manage discontinuities that might happen along the way.

A strategy may no longer be a path but a definition of a playing field within which all the strategy implementers need to operate.

So the new principles of strategy making will be to recognise the following:

a. Nothing will be gained if all obstacles have to be overcome first

b. If strategy earlier was about "looking before you leap" in future the principle will be to "look while you leap". He who pauses too long will be lost

c. With the pace of change so fast, the future will not be about the "survival of the fittest" but one about "survival of the fastest". Speed of action and reaction will be the key

d. Strategy making will no longer be linear, top down but will be interactive and circular. From being "for the people", it will be "by the people, for the people and of the people".

In this age of continuous discontinuity, there is a need for continuous learning. And this will not come from boardrooms but from the people on the shop floor "" the market place.

As Professor Mintzberg rightly said, "Real strategies are rarely made in conference rooms, but more likely to be cooked up in hallway conversations, casual working groups or quiet moments of reflection on long airplane flights." Real information will come from front-line people, not from consultants and surveys.

Another critical change will be to recognise that execution is as important as the strategy formulation. A strategy is as good or as bad as its execution. So strategy is 20 per cent planning and 80 per cent people.

So, to manage strategy in this new age of discontinuity, there needs to be a change in corporate culture and mindsets. Systems need to operate differently. There needs to be more flexibility.

People should not be married to a plan, and be prepared to change mid-way if need be. Egos or getting inconvenienced should not be the reason to maintain status quo on a plan agreed upon at the start of the year.

Further organisational systems must be geared to change mixes and processes as new challenges emerge on the ground in the market place. There has to be internal and external mechanisms in place to identify leading change indicators so that the organisation is proactive in the process of strategy development and execution.

In this context, leaders and managers must:

Be more open (in sharing goals and plans; and listening to feedback)

Give more autonomy (and with it accountability)

Be more accommodative of failures (better to dare and act with limited information rather than wait for perfect information and miss the bus!).

In sum "" foster, develop and grow intrapreneurs.

The vowel principle (a, e, i, o, u) of people management will drive strategy formulation and execution

Prepare people by making them understand the broad plan

Get people to own the plan

Allow them to improvise as they go along (use intuition to go beyond data and pre-decided plan to take decisions)

Make them feel empowered to take decisions in keeping with the overall plan (convert threats into opportunities)

Give them the courage to act (better to say sorry than ask permission).

Clearly strategy is moving from playing five-day cricket to one-day international.

Five-day cricket is a gentleman's game; its about endurance and attrition, you have a second innings; its about planning and playing to it and ultimately the better team wins.

One-day cricket is different. Its about passion and aggression; its about speed, agility and quick thinking; there is no second innings; there needs to be a plan, however with it an openness to improvise along the way and the better team on the day wins.

Corporates and brands need to look at strategy differently.

Something worth thinking about.

(The author is Country Manager "" Discovery, Ogilvy and Mather India. The views expressed are personal)

madhukar.sabnavis@ogilvy.com