WE’VE TALKED A great deal about what a strategist does, but we’ve touched only lightly on the person who does it. For all the information available on strategy, little is devoted to what will make you a successful strategist. What skills and mind-sets do you need to hone? What unique value could you bring to your business?
My final task is to address these questions, and to help you be the strategist you want to be. Unlike so much of the work you’ve done up to here, this last leap requires putting aside the industry analyses and the strategy statements, and instead looking deeply into the how of being a strategist.
The most important thing is to understand that you are not a manager of strategy, or a functional specialist. Others can fill those roles. You are, first and foremost, a leader. Your goal is to build something that is not already there. To do so, you must confront the four basic questions you have already explored:
What does my organization bring to the world?
Does that difference matter?
Is something about it scarce and difficult to imitate?
Are we doing today what we need to do in order to matter tomorrow?
As a leader, you must answer these questions.
Most business practitioners (and most business thinkers, for that matter) are unaccustomed to facing questions of this kind—at least when put so starkly. We’re much more comfortable confining ourselves to more tangible business issues: Is our market shrinking or growing? What are our competitors up to? To lead, you have to be willing to make room for new challenges and be open to the unique ways you can add value to your business. Think about this old Zen story. A powerful and self-assured man goes to a Zen master and asks to be taught about enlightenment. After sizing up the guest in an initial conversation, the Zen master invites him to have tea. The master pours. He goes on pouring even though the tea is flowing over the brim of the cup.
“Stop!” the visitor calls out. “Can’t you see that the cup is overflowing?”
“Yes,” the Zen master replies. “But a cup that is already full cannot take in anything else.” If one’s mind is already filled to the brim, there is no place for new ideas.
To be a strategist, one must be willing to explore new ways of leading.
BE A FIRE STARTER
Being a strategist takes drive and initiative, and the willingness and curiosity to ask questions and venture forward. As bedrock important as strategy is to the long-term success of a firm, you might think that investors, boards of advisors, even those working in a firm would keep it uppermost in a leader’s mind. Unfortunately, the opposite is too often true; parties you’d think would be clamoring for more settle for less, especially if a business’s numbers are reasonably good. The commitment and passion—the fire starting—for this work must come from you.
But leaders themselves, and their own schedules, are often part of the problem.
Finding the time and courage to address strategy is a constant challenge for most leaders. Sure, you know you need to work on strategy now and then, and you recognize that your management team needs it. But you’re the one who has to make space for it and that rarely is easy. “Managers who get caught in the trap of overwhelming demands become prisoners of routines,” wrote Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, in A Bias for Action. “They do not have time to notice opportunities. Their habituated work prevents them from taking the first necessary step toward harnessing willpower: developing the capacity to dream an idea into existence and transforming it into a concrete intention.”1
Stephen Covey’s celebrated distinction between urgent and important activities helps us understand, in part, why this is so. Too often people are consumed by activities that are urgent but not important—interruptions, many day-to-day activities, and common fires every manager faces. What suffers are endeavors that are important but not urgent: building organizational capabilities, nurturing long-term relationships, and developing viable strategies.
Beyond competing demands and the adrenaline rush that comes with constant activity, there is an even deeper explanation about why many leaders, and many firms, fail to fully engage with strategy: They’re comfortable with the status quo even when it isn’t scintillating. Schumpeter warned long ago that most people are content with keeping things the way they are. Richard Swedberg, a Schumpeter expert, notes that the conservative nature of people pushes back against innovation, and many leaders themselves resist change: “While doing what is familiar is always easy . . . doing what is new is not.”3 Or, as Schumpeter said, “The whole difference between swimming with the stream and against the stream is to be found here.”4
For economic development to flourish, leaders must swim against the stream. They must step forward and take the initiative, energetically showing the way. Schumpeter refers to this type of leader as a “Man of Action” (Mann der Tat), someone who does not accept reality as it is. The Man of Action, in Swedberg’s interpretation, “does not have the same inner obstacles to change as static people or people who avoid doing what is new. What then drives the man of action? In contrast the static person, who goes about his business because he wants to satisfy his needs and stops once his goal has been accomplished, the leader has other sources of motivation. He charges ahead because he wants power and because he wants to accomplish things . . .”5
Behind every pulsating, vibrant successful strategy is a leader who seized the initiative and made it happen. Developing and executing strategy with all the necessary dimensions—including the accountability that attends to making decisions with great consequences—is not a function. It is a leadership job, and a big one.
IT’S YOUR CHOICE
In a now classic Harvard Business Review article, published in 1963, the year before the first women were admitted to the MBA program, Seymour Tilles, a lecturer at the school, wrote about the responsibility leaders have for setting a course for a company. He proposed that of all the questions a chief executive is required to answer, one predominates: What kind of company do you want yours to be? (He raised a similar question for aspiring leaders about themselves.) Wrote Tilles:
If you ask young men what they want to accomplish by the time they are 40, the answers you get fall into two distinct categories. There are those—the great majority—who will respond in terms of what they want to have. This is especially true of graduate students of business administration. There are some men, however, who will answer in terms of the kind of men they hope to be. These are the only ones who have a clear idea of where they are going.
The same is true of companies. For far too many companies, what little thinking goes on about the future is done primarily in money terms. There is nothing wrong with financial planning. Most companies should do more of it. But there is a basic fallacy in confusing a financial plan with thinking about the kind of company you want yours to become. It is like saying, “When I’m 40, I’m going to be rich.” It leaves too many basic questions unanswered. Rich in what way? Rich doing what?6
In the last three decades, as strategy has moved to become a science, we have allowed this fundamental insight to slip away. We need to bring it back. Existentialist philosophers understood the importance of choices. They recognized that as individuals, who we are is to a large extent an accumulation of all the choices, large and small, we’ve made through the years of our lives. External events and influences are important, too, but our choices are the most powerful lever we have to affect our lives.
So, too, for companies. But who makes the vital choices that determine a firm’s very identity? Who says, “This is our purpose, not that. This is who we will be. This is why our customers and clients will prefer a world with us rather than without us”? These are the questions the strategist must own. While existence may be given, essence never is. The story, the meaning, the real significance must be made. As a leader, it is yours to create. Others, inside and outside the firm, will contribute in meaningful ways, but in the end, it is the leader who bears responsibility for the choices that are made.
It is this responsibility that gives you a profound opportunity to shape your business and influence its destiny. Or as Jean-Paul Sartre, a major exponent of existentialism, put it, “There is a future to be fashioned.”7 Sartre championed what he called “the possibility of choice,” celebrating the way it positions people to craft identity and define purpose. In his view, it is this fundamental aspect—the possibility of choice—that creates the opportunity to find meaning. “Man first of all exists,” he writes, “encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.”8 Sartre’s is a universe that creates boundless possibilities for self-definition.
Now consider the meaning this conviction, this faith in the power of individuals to “surge up in the world,” “invent themselves,” and “fashion a future” can hold in the business world. Isn’t this what Schumpeter was saying? Isn’t it what business should be all about? Managers trying to sustain strategic perspective must be ready to confront this basic challenge. Organizations have to “surge up,” “invent themselves,” and “fashion” their futures. They too face what Sartre calls a “possibility of choice” every day their doors are open. Or rather, their owners and managers do, for just as Sartre assigns people responsibility for fashioning their futures, the strategic imperative for organizations falls to those who lead them.
This quest is as relevant for large multibusiness companies as it is for focused, owner-led ones. As leveraged buy-outs proliferate and supply chains open up around the world, nothing is more important for any firm than a clear sense of purpose, a clear sense of why they matter. A board chairman at one such conglomerate made the point bluntly when he asked, “What hot dish is this company bringing to the table?” He was issuing the same challenge.
Such work can take enormous courage and fortitude—the way Young and Kohl at Brighton Collectibles insist on minimum resale prices and refuse to sell to stores that won’t provide sufficient marketing support for their brand, or the way Ingvar Kamprad chose to produce furniture for the many, not the few. These are the decisions that determine not only what a business will do, but, more fundamentally, what a business will be. Few choices could matter more.
STAY AGILE
As we saw with Apple, the strategist’s work is never done. Achieving and maintaining strategic momentum is a challenge that confronts an organization and its leader every day of their entwined existence. It’s not one choice a strategist must make, but multiple choices over time.
Helmuth von Moltke, a disciple of the military theorist Clausewitz, understood this well: “Certainly the commander in chief will keep his great objective continuously in mind, undisturbed by the vicissitudes of events. But the path on which he hopes to reach it can never be firmly established in advance. Through the campaign he must make a series of decisions on the basis of situations that cannot be foreseen. . . . Everything depends on penetrating the uncertainty of veiled situations to evaluate facts, to clarify the unknown, to make decisions rapidly, and then to carry them out with strength and constancy.”9
No less than for the military commander, this is your job, and it’s a challenging balancing act. As we learned in previous chapters, great strategies are systems, with their own integrity and internal harmony among the elements (think of how De Sole rigorously linked everything he did to his purpose, from product line on up to management culture). Often, you will be able to adapt while keeping your purpose intact. But you cannot confuse the integrity of a system with rigidity. Your system of value creation has to be flexible and adaptable. Like your strategy, it too has to evolve over time, and respond to—or better yet, anticipate—changes in the business environment or within the firm itself that can make its elements obsolete.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum describes the balance in a system as a “fragile integrity.” It is “impossible to build water-tight ships that will withstand all contingencies,” she wrote. “You cannot remove ungoverned chance from human life.”10 And it is wrong to try.
As a strategist, you need to live with “ungoverned chance.” Nussbaum talks about this as going from a “more confident to a less confident wisdom,” cultivating “flexible responsiveness, rather than rigid hardness.”11 This requires letting go of a “rage for control” and being open to rethinking and refashioning elements of your strategy.
Even more fundamentally, as a leader you must allow yourself to be open to reinterpreting what your business is about. Just as it is necessary to stake out a purpose, a leader must be open to rethinking that purpose in order to move the business forward. Theseus was willing to change over every part of his ship to preserve its seaworthiness. As a strategist, you must be willing to replace virtually every component of your business to extend its relevance and future.
There is a temptation, I think widespread, to believe that the firm comprises its parts and their alignment, and that certain parts of the business are so critical to what a firm is that without them the firm, in an important sense, ceases to be. You are the one who must resist this temptation and persuade others when big changes are due. Pablo Picasso put it bluntly: “Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.”12
Very rare is the leader who will not, at some point in his or her career, have to overhaul a company’s strategy in perhaps dramatic ways. Sometimes this brings moments of epiphany—eureka flashes of insight that ignite dazzling new ways of thinking about an enterprise, its purpose, its potential. I have witnessed some of these moments, in small group meetings or even in the classroom, as managers reconceptualize what their organizations do and are capable of doing. These episodes are inspiring. They can become catalytic.
Other times these decisions can be wrenching, particularly if you have built a business that may need to be taken apart and put back together again in a new way. More than one owner or manager—men and women coming to grips with what their organizations are and what they want them to become—has described that retooling as an intense personal struggle. Recall real estate entrepreneur Kerr Taylor’s anguished decision in chapter 6 to shut down his original broker-dealer business in the economic downturn. Though it no longer offered his company a strategic advantage, he was emotionally attached to it and couldn’t let go. When he finally faced up to reality and closed it, he said, “It was one of the hardest things I ever did.”
Yet those same people often say that the experience was one of the most rewarding of their lives. It can be profoundly liberating as a kind of corporate rebirth or creation. An executive student, the CEO of a large Asian firm, once described his own experience: “I love our business, our people, the challenges, the fact that other people get deep benefits from what we sell,” he said. “Even so, in the coming years, I can see that we will need to go in a new direction, and that will mean selling off parts of the business. The market has gotten too competitive, and we don’t make the margins we used to.” He winced as he admitted this.
Then he lowered his voice and added something surprising. “At a fundamental level, though, it’s changes like this that keep us fresh, and keep me going. While it can be painful when it happens, in the long run I wouldn’t want to lead a company that didn’t reinvent itself.”
Done well, undertaken organically, the exercise of crafting strategy becomes a journey that can renew both a company and a leader. Those who shoulder the responsibilities of an owner or top manager likely already know the satisfaction of building something, creating something that would not have otherwise existed. Max De Pree, the legendary CEO of Herman Miller, said it well: “In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.”13
And that, finally, is the point of everything, isn’t it? Making something and helping it find its way. Continually refining and renewing its reason to exist. It is the enduring job of a leader. As we saw in Apple, businesses, no less than people, have to reinvent themselves.
GET YOUR TEAM ON BOARD
Even as you strive for a big-picture view of your business, you need to become intimate with it at the ground level. After all, you’re leading a group effort. You need to connect with people throughout the business so that you can both inspire them and learn from them. If you don’t fill them in on your thinking, they’re not likely to make strategy part of their agenda. And if you don’t enlist their knowledge in creating plans, you are wasting an invaluable resource: As the people who talk with the customers and do a lion’s share of the work, they possess information you can’t do without.
Thomas Saporito, chairman of RHR International, a management development firm, believes that many leaders get so locked into their own vision that they resist hearing when others don’t believe in it. One executive he coached, a CEO of a Fortune 100 company, set ambitious goals but focused more on the soundness of his strategy than on others’ acceptance of it: He “was so blind to how the board and employees really felt about it, that he couldn’t gauge their low levels of buy-in.” He was eventually asked to step aside. “Almost every CEO I’ve worked with stumbles at some point because of this,” Saporito wrote. “When that happens, I remind them that executives don’t get paid to be right. They get paid to be effective.”14
Max De Pree was eloquent on this subject as well. He believed that everyone in an organization has a right to understand strategy and a right to be involved in it. “Good communication is not simply sending and receiving. Nor is good communication simply an exchange of data,” he wrote. “The best communication forces you to listen.”15 Throughout, however, De Pree recognized that leaders have an obligation to provide and maintain momentum: “It is the feeling among a group of people that their lives and their work are intertwined and moving toward a recognizable and legitimate goal.” Such momentum comes from a “clear vision of what the corporation ought to be, from a well-thought out strategy to achieve that vision, and from carefully conceived and communicated directions and plans that enable everyone to participate and be publicly accountable in achieving those plans.”16
Napoleon put it this way: “Define reality, give hope.”
That great advice acknowledges the importance of facing and interpreting hard-nosed economic reality (as Manoogian of Masco did not), underscores the need for a purpose and a plan (as we saw in IKEA and Gucci), and recognizes the human need of team members to be motivated and assured. In rallying the Gucci troops around his new purpose, De Sole made it his job to keep people informed, while also responding to the rapid business changes around him.
“I was very good at motivating and communicating with people. I used to give speeches in the cafeteria so that everyone would know what we were doing,” he said in an interview. “I was very decisive in upgrading personnel and making very hard decisions. I was disciplined, and under real pressure to perform. It was a constant process of making changes.”
The hard and the soft, all in one.
Taylor of AmREIT speaks with enthusiasm about working on strategy with his team. “It starts with a deep dive,” he says, “but then continues as an ongoing strategic conversation. Discussion is honest, open—which is particularly important when issues are tough.” It took time and effort to reach this point, he adds. “Over the last ten years we have had to let go of a lot of ego and power levels.” Now the team has a common language around strategy. Today, it’s the glue: “We have conversations that relate to strategy in some way every week.”
If a leader shortchanges questions of strategy, an organization and everyone in it will suffer. If a leader shortchanges the team and fails to clearly communicate that strategy, listen to others, or inspire them to get on board, the outcome will be equally bad. As a strategist, that means your ability to communicate—and to connect with others in the organization—is as vital to your success as anything else you do.
ONCE AGAIN: THE CHOICE IS YOURS
In the closing session of the EOP program, I offer the executives some advice: “On the way home, if the person sitting next to you on the plane asks what you do, simply say: ‘I’m a guardian of organizational purpose.’17 After that, you won’t need to worry about any more questions coming from that direction!”
The EOPers always laugh, but by this time in the course, it’s a knowing laugh. They recognize there’s a real truth buried in the humor: If they don’t embrace the role behind those words, something essential in their businesses will be missing.
Working with thousands of leaders, I’ve seen that you don’t have to be Steve Jobs to feel good about the contribution you’ve made, or the business you’ve helped to build. In my classes, it’s not just the multibillion-dollar steel and world-class microfinance companies that bring satisfaction, but the candle company that began in a kitchen and grew to support not only the couple who started it, but more than one thousand others; the coffee roaster who stepped out of his family’s business to offer a new value proposition to a new set of customers; the medical supply company that’s grown with a family over three generations, each leader weathering his or her own share of crises and the ongoing need to find new footing, a new reason to matter.
Part of the gratification these leaders experience stems from grappling with one’s business issues at unexpected depth, and seeing them in a larger context, such as an executive in a storage business who came to a much more sophisticated understanding of the impact of the powerful economic forces in his industry, or the owner of a financial services network who rebuilt his franchise from the ground up to serve a larger but less wealthy client group. Whether refining a business’s purpose or direction, or how all of that is brought to life, leaders say they are grappling with their firm’s future at a more basic level than they had before.
When pressed, some refer to the transition from understanding the broad outlines of a leader’s role to a more grounded sense of what the position demands. Others refer to a newfound belief in the possibility of shaping their firm’s future in a way that they had not previously considered.
A few individuals mention something else. Before, they say, they thought about strategy as a set of problems to be solved—the way it is so often approached in both practice and in school. Now, however, they’re thinking about strategy as a way of life for themselves as a leader, a set of questions to be lived.18 Miguel Aguiluz, the founder of Ink for Less, talks about how he has internalized the process. He wants his businesses to be distinct, not only when they’re founded, but over time. “I just find ways and means to be different from the other guys. That’s what I do,” he said. When working a new idea all the way through a strategy, he sometimes finds himself at loggerheads with his operations executives, who are reluctant to switch gears or change a good thing. But, he says, “an internally consistent strategy most of the time makes a winning company.”
Each of these leaders invested the best of themselves in their work. They identified compelling purposes, built organizations to achieve them, and ultimately produced differences that really mattered. In doing so, they gave meaning to their businesses and also to themselves.
During the last days of the EOP program, I ask the class to read a rather unusual article by the late Harvard philosophy professor Robert Nozick.19 It proposes that we substitute the difficulties and potential dreariness of daily living with an Experience Machine, a kind of virtual reality contraption. Nozick asks us to contemplate a world where we can achieve anything we wish, fully formed, simply by programming and stepping into this machine. With the experience prepared for us, there are no decisions or actions required other than choosing the experience itself. That means no sleepless nights, no hand-wringing, no agonizing choices or decisions. Simply step in and go.
As appealing as this may seem at first, few are tempted to accept the offer. They recognize that such pretend reality would deprive them of participating in the very actions that create the experiences. While the process of getting from here to there is not always enjoyable, and the end is not always favorable, the undertaking itself is theirs, it’s part of who they are. “Should it be surprising that what we are is important to us?” asks Nozick. “Why should we be concerned only with how our time is filled, but not with what we are?”20
Reflecting on their own lives, EOPers often say that they like the accountability for their journeys, and their uniqueness. They like the “off-road,” serendipitous experiences that would be missed in a preprogrammed existence. Imagine if Ingvar Kamprad had missed the boycott of his goods and the Polish solution that led to a completely new way to compete. Or if Domenico De Sole had continued to pursue his Washington law career and not gotten drawn into the troubled business of a client. Sure, these experiences could be dialed in, but first someone else would have to imagine them, and even so, the experiences would not be authentic, the rewards of lives that were actively lived.21
Nozick’s Experience Machine is a fantasy, of course—at least so far—but it opens a door to thinking deeply about the meaning of what you do. How many people have you met who plow through life without a sense of purpose, who go through the motions, ape the ways of others, and get their rewards from keeping score? They may be highly accomplished, but there’s little authentic about them. Sartre captured it with his challenging assertion: “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” The poet T. S. Eliot had another angle: “We had the experience, but we missed the meaning.”
In 2002, Tony Deifell, a photographer and graduating MBA, zeroed in on this question. He asked some of his classmates to respond to a question in a poem by American author Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Their responses, along with their photographs, became the basis for the Harvard Business School “Portrait Project,” a tradition that has continued every year since.
At the close of my EOP course, I share Oliver’s poem with the class, and urge them to visit the Portrait Project. While the exhibition is focused on people starting out in their lives, I believe it’s equally important that we keep asking Oliver’s question of ourselves, in our thirties, our fifties, our seventies.
In raising Oliver’s question, the last thing I would want to do is “lead the witness” or attempt to equate being a strategist as the central answer to the query. But, if you’re like the EOPers who respond with deep emotion to the poem, I suspect that many of you will find the connection. It has to do with the kind of contribution you want to make.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver
New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992)
(Copyright 1992 by Mary Oliver. Reproduced with Permission.)
WITH AND WITHOUT YOU
You, like the business leaders and MBAs I have taught for more than thirty years, must ask not just “What would the world be like without my business?” but also “What would my business be like without a strategist?”22 What if no one in your firm stepped up to the role? No one weighed the options and chose what the business would be—why and to whom it would matter? What if no one built a system of advantage that enabled it to do something in particular, particularly well? What if no one scanned the horizon with vigilant eyes, watched over the firm, kept it vibrant, and moved it forward?
I know these companies. You do, too. They’re all over the world. They’re the lackluster businesses that seem to be waiting for something to happen. They’re the down-on-their-heels ones, where people are working feverishly, but not making headway. They’re the ones plodding forward, but never catching or creating a wave. They’re the ones that don’t cohere, or that work against themselves, undermining in one part of the business what they’re doing in another part.
They’re not the kind of companies most of us would be eager to work for, or, for that matter, to do business with. They aren’t the companies making a difference.
By contrast, most of the business leaders I have worked with come to embrace the role of the strategist seriously and with enthusiasm. They like the inspiration they feel about what they do and why that matters. They like the feeling that the world with and without them at the helm would be different.
As a leader, if you ignore or underestimate your crucial, ongoing role as a strategist, something essential in your business will be missing. Answered well over a lifetime, the questions at the heart of strategy will help a company prevail. Answered poorly, or not at all, they leave it adrift and vulnerable.
Articulating and tending to a living strategy is a human endeavor in the deepest sense of the term. Keeping all the parts of a company in balance while moving an enterprise forward is extraordinarily difficult. Even when they have substantial talent and a deep appreciation for the job, some leaders ultimately don’t get it right. Their legacies serve as sobering reminders of the complexities and responsibilities of stewardship. On the other hand, it is exactly these challenges that make the triumphs so rewarding.