Sublime

A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

At the core, strategy is about focus, and most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.”

Strategy began when people realized that telling warriors to ‘go out and fight the invaders’ didn’t work. Leaders had to impose a structure, a design, on how the group would fight. In a modern business, a strategy is the exercise of power to make parts of the system do things they would not do, if left to themselves.”

Strategy cannot be a useful concept if it is a synonym for success. Nor can it be a useful tool if it is confused with ambition, determination, inspirational leadership, and innovation.

I asked the group to imagine that they were allowed to have only one objective. And the objective had to be feasible. What one single feasible objective, when accomplished, would make the biggest difference?

A good strategy has an essential logical structure that I call the kernel. The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.

The kernel is a list reminding us that a good strategy has, at a minimum, three essential components: a diagnosis of the situation, the choice of an overall guiding policy, and the design of coherent action.

It is not about setting overall performance goals. For this reason, it is important that a Strategy Foundry be held separately from any budgeting process.