YOUR STRATEGY NEEDS A STRATEGY: HOW TO CHOOSE AND EXECUTE THE RIGHT APPROACH
Martin Reeves, Knut Hannaes,
Janmejaya Sinha
Harvard Business Review Press
267 pages; Rs 1,095
Strategy has got to be the most abused word in business. People toss it around all the time - CEOs talk of strategies for growth, marketing heads likewise for increasing sales. These are actually goals tom-tommed as strategies, and that is the fundamental problem with strategy. Not that business authors haven't pointed this out earlier, but what is interesting about this book is that it actually lays down a framework to identify one from the other and also a formula - which the authors call a palette - to determine and deploy the best strategy for a business.
Don't go by the title of the book - I would rather read spam mails for a week than open a book with that name. But once you get down to it, you will see the book breaks rank with typical offerings on the subject and shifts attention from what is being done to why it is being done, from the directions chosen to the problems that these choices address.
The best part of the book is the way it breaks down situations corporations face today, and the strategies that can be deployed to tackle them, into clearly defined sets. At a fundamental level, the success of a strategy depends on a firm's alignment with the environment. So what are the environment types? Classical, Adaptive, Visionary, Shaping and Renewal, say the authors, and add that each of these corresponds to a typical approach to strategy.
Leaders who take a Classical approach to strategy believe that the world is predictable and that they cannot change their environment. So they want to sustain their advantage based on superior size or capabilities. Adaptive firms believe that business environment is neither predictable nor malleable, so they can win by repeatedly changing themselves, identifying new options more quickly and economically than others.
Leaders taking a Visionary approach believe they can reliably create or recreate an environment largely by themselves. As such, visionary firms win by being the first to introduce a revolutionary new product or business model. A Shaping firm operates under a high degree of unpredictability, and has to collaborate with the associated stakeholder ecosystem.
The Renewal strategy is markedly different from the other four approaches in that it is initially defensive and is a prelude to adopting one of the other approaches to strategy.
The authors go on to develop a strategy matrix - sorry, palette - that can be applied on three levels. To quote the authors, it can be used to "match and correctly execute the right approach to strategy for a specific part of the business, to effectively manage multiple approaches to strategy in different parts of the business or over time, and to help leaders to animate the resulting collage of approaches".
So far so good. From here on, I have mixed feelings about the book. The first section, between chapters one and five, was tremendously thought-provoking. I was struck by the challenges to the more common approaches to strategic planning. The enormity of the task - to identify the problem an organisation faces, work out the guiding policy and coordinate the actions of multiple stakeholders - was a reminder for business journalists like me to think twice before criticising corporations and their travails with scathing gusto.
The remaining chapters ("Ambidexterity: Be Polychromatic" and "Lessons for Leaders; Be the Animator") were a potpourri of thoughts - some helpful, some not. I probably lost my way a bit. A few other criticisms: the authors flogged some hackneyed examples - Toyota, Novo Nordisk, Pepsi, Apple… Then, in a subtitle "The eight roles of leaders" the book ends up over-emphasising single-leader environments; such top-down and command-and control structures are exceptions these days and might not be particularly instructive to the average leader in a new-age corporation.
The book also overlooked certain other skills of the leader - inspiring people, aligning their emotions with corporate goals or even developing and engaging talent. These thoughts are not excluded but are a very small part of the overall scheme of things. Maybe all that was outside the purview of this book but you might begin to think leaders sit in ivory towers and design complex strategies with the help of templates, matrices, not to forget palettes.
What is it that Colin Powell said? "Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers."
