The Flaw of Strategic Thinking

Throughout my earlier days of training in Strategic Planning at the old Honeywell Inc., the decade of the 1980s spent in fear and admiration of Japanese strategy and far-sighted thinking, the awe with which we read Michael Porter, Kenichi Ohmae, Peter Drucker and other management consulting gurus and my current days practicing and teaching enterprise architecture as a strategic asset that helps strategic thinking, I have always been curious why the obvious is not the obvious - especially to action oriented CEOs and young executives.

Usually dismissing strategy (sometimes as a pastime for the old and for people with time on their hands, but more often, as a luxury that is too expensive to indulge in given the pressing problems of the day) young managers and CEOs are focused on the here and now.

As I look at the America around me and the bemoaning of self-defeating behaviors, short-term gains, greed and a lack of a strategic focus on whats good for the citizen and the country, the absence of a respect for strategy becomes even more curious and more than a little, baffling.

As I stop to think - and distinguish between Tactics and Strategy

1. Tactics, obsession with control, and short-term reactions are primarily intended to save the day. These are behaviors intended for daily survival. They are also the causes of daily stress both within the manager and the enterprise that he/she manages. However, the overriding fact remains - take away the tactics, reactionary actions and controlling behavior and the enterprise dies rather quickly.

2. Strategy on the other hand is a long term game that promises ultimate success. Strategy sometimes involves making short term sacrifices in order to prevail and emerge, often as the only winner in a long war. Strategy transcends battles in the pursuit of winning the war. Strategy condones strategic retreats and temporary setbacks (as long as they are PLANNED in!).

But the problem is that long term survival involves a continous back to back series of many short term survivals. And short term survivals cannot tolerate strategic thinking because of the time imperative. Thus, all strategic thinking must take a back seat to tactics and survival.

Is there some way to balance this lopsided focus on tactics and inject a whiff of strategy to hopefully provide sustained survival?

1. We need to increase the "time to death" for an enterprise by building up some resources, reserves and free time so that we can plan. Much the same way as a camel stores water for the long trek through the desert, we need to divert a portion of the days profit towards building this nest egg of free time, resources and lack of stress and tension to strategize. "Time to death" is some abstract measure that estimates the approximate demise of an enterprise.

2. The resources and time we free up by increasing "the time to death" of an enterprise must be thrown into innovative and strategic exercises - long term competitive advantage gambits, sweeping new product lines, brand new markets and investments in stable customer relationships.

3. Strategic success is a moving target - all success should be measured in terms of tactical successes - every strategy must be planned with smaller short term successes in much the same way that software development relies on spiral delivery techniques to keep the sponsors at bay and to track changing requirements that have occured while the software was being developed.

4. Personal financial strategies provide a fine analogy for enterprise strategies - While spending today's dollars on today's pressing problems, smart people still manage to store away a small sum that later helps them meet some strategic goal ten years down the line - College or Retirement or a house ....