The New How [Paperback]: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy

Top-down edicts also typically lack an understanding of organizational capabilities and capacity, as well as an acknowledgment of what the people throughout the organization believe they can accomplish.

Directives like this aim to make it easier to implement a strategy, but this technique of spelling out the ways and means to accomplish a strategic goal is generally a setup for failure.

In Silicon Valley, we call that gap an “Air Sandwich”: the empty void in an organization between the high-level strategy conjured up in the stratosphere and the realization of that vision down on the ground. Rather than connective pieces between the vision and the reality, the filling in an Air Sandwich consists mainly of misunderstandings, confusi

a strategy is a way to win. Although it’s seemingly that simple on one level, practitioners know that strategy is also about making choices. It’s about deciding not only what to do but what not to do. And it definitely involves making choices about who to involve, how to listen, which ideas to consider, and how to make tough decisions, as well as k

A strategy is not just a plan because, although the word “strategy” is by definition a noun (an artifact such as a document or presentation), in practice most people also use the word to refer to the process by which the strategy is created. In other words, people overload the meaning of the word “strategy” because they don’t distinguish the act of

When strategy is viewed as a noun and is not accompanied by a robust process framework to enable solid creation, we are left with something that simply won’t work. The thing — the noun — is broken by the very way it was created.

Winning depends on fully completed strategy now more than ever before. What leaders at all levels are expected to do today compared to even 10 years ago is amazingly demanding. More and better creative strategies are needed to win, and the rapidly shifting market has robbed us of the luxury we once had to ready, aim, fire. Now, it feels more like f

Perhaps people fixate on execution (“doing what’s required”) instead of finishing up strategy (“choosing the direction”) because it’s easier to see progress during execution than during strategy formation and development.

An Air Sandwich is, in effect, a strategy that has clear vision and future direction on the top layer, day-to-day action on the bottom, and virtually nothing in the middle — no meaty key decisions that connect the two layers, no rich chewy center filling to align the new direction with new actions within the company.