LF05 - Strategy is Memory

26: distinguish good strategy vs meh strategyGood: all about connecting the dots to get people from a to bIf you are given a metric, you have to get every artifact you have and match it to that goal.

Pay close attention to assumptions you are making unknowingly- look for confusion in people when you explain

33: when you start at a new company and wor... See more

If we’re going to talk about ‘the future of strategy’ then we are going to have to talk about how relegating strategy to the supply of disposable ‘insights’ and ‘propositions’ for other people’s creative processes is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of strategy.

The human brain is incredible at uncovering meaning, but is deficient at long-term memory storage. If we forget what we read, we can’t apply the knowledge to the problem at hand. We don’t need to read a long write-up on Figma’s winning strategy on a Wednesday at 11am when it hits our inbox, but we should be able to reference it if we’re building a ... See more

Strategy is brain-work – more often than not it’s abstract and invisible, and challenging to articulate. This is the research, analysis, and debate that goes into making decisions, and the data that comes from observations, interviews, user studies, post-its, brainstorms, and mind maps.

Now, it’s worth remembering where I was back in 2004. I had a purpose which wasn’t static despite my belief it was. I was jumping to strategy whilst ignoring landscape, climate and doctrine. I was using storytelling to communicate with the entire group. I had no mechanism of learning. I was simply copying secrets of success from others combined wit... See more

For me strategy was about insatiable curiosity, falling down rabbit holes, connecting seemingly disparate dots, being that annoying kid in the backseat of the car on a long road trip who keeps asking ‘but, why?’, diving deep on subjects I’d never explored before, becoming a master of pointless trivia and therefore excellent in a pub quiz scenario.

B... See more

In 2004, I sat down in my boardroom with our strategy documents and started to dissect them. There were lots of familiar and comfortable terms. We had to be innovative, efficient, customer centric, web 2.0 and all that this entailed. Alas, I suspected these common “memes” were repeated in the strategy documents of other companies because I was pret... See more

When I looked at my strategy document, I could see a purpose and then a huge jump into leadership and the strategic choices we had made. But where was landscape, climate and doctrine? I started to think back to every business book that I had read. Everything seemed to do this jump from purpose to leadership.