Avoid These Strategy Mistakes

Joan Magretta is a senior associate at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School. She is the author Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy--an excellent introduction to Porter's work.  If you make or execute strategy this book is worth your time--very readable and useful.  Critical mistakes include:

Mistake #1. Confusing marketing with strategy. Correction: A value proposition isn't the same thing as a strategy. To establish a competitive advantage, a company must deliver its distinctive value through a distinctive value chain.

Mistake #2. Confusing competitive advantage with "what you're good at." Correction: Building on strength is a good thing, but when it comes to strategy, companies are too often inward looking and therefore likely to overestimate their strengths.
Mistake #3: Pursuing size above all else, because if you're the biggest, you'll be more profitable. Correction: There is at least a grain of truth in this thinking, which is precisely what makes it so dangerous. But before you assume that bigger is always better, it is critical to run the numbers for your business
Mistake #4. Thinking that "growth" or "reaching $1 billion in revenue" is a strategy. Correction: Don't confuse strategy with actions (grow, acquire, divest, etc.) or with goals (reach X billion in sales, Y share of market). Porter's definition: the set of integrated choices that define how you will achieve superior performance in the face of competition. It's not the goal (e.g., be number one or reach $1 billion in top-line revenue), nor is it a specific action (e.g., make acquisitions). It's the positioning you choose that will result in achieving the goal; the actions are the path you take to realize the positioning. Moreover, when Porter defines strategy, he is really talking about what constitutes a good strategy — one that will result in a higher ROIC than the industry average. The real problem here is that you will think you have a strategy when you don't.

Mistake #5. Focusing on high-growth markets, because that's where the money is. Correction: Managers often mistakenly assume that a high-growth industry will be an attractive one. Wrong. Growth is no guarantee that the industry will be profitable.

When to Make Critical Decisions

David Allen's (GTD) recent newsletter provides excellent insights from research on artful decision making.  This is David's summary.  He provides additional insights in his fantastic books and seminars.  Any leader of complex projects and programs will benefit.

1. Don't force your team (or youtself) to make decisions in the same meeting that presents all the data and perspectives. Purely conscious decision-making is quite constrained in its capacity to absorb and weigh complexities and more likely to employ limiting stereotypes and prejudices in its judgments.

2. Another validation of the power of the GTD Weekly Review. We have to make a lot of choices on the run, in the helter-skelter of our daily existence. You don't have time to think and ponder and consider all the factors. Putting all the potentially relevant data into your psyche every seven days (doing a thorough Weekly Review of your commitments, areas of focus, someday maybe's, time-based commitments, etc.) hard-wires your intuitive intelligence, which allows you trust (vs. hope) in your quick judgment calls.

3. Positive outcome focus as a way to create what you want is not just a hope-it-works belief—it's verifiable as a tool to put your unconscious thinking to work. The reticular activating system in the brain—the part of our neurology that gets programmed to recognize patterns, based upon our focus and identifications with images and outcomes—gets us to see and think things otherwise inaccessible. Now we have good data to prove that this not only impacts our conscious perceptions, but also (and perhaps more importantly) our unconscious integrative processes.

When To Make Critical Decisions

David Allen's (GTD) recent newsletter provides excellent insights from research on artful decision making.  This is David's summary.  He provides additional insights in his fantastic books and seminars.  Any leader of complex projects and programs will benefit.

1. Don't force your team (or youtself) to make decisions in the same meeting that presents all the data and perspectives. Purely conscious decision-making is quite constrained in its capacity to absorb and weigh complexities and more likely to employ limiting stereotypes and prejudices in its judgments.

2. Another validation of the power of the GTD Weekly Review. We have to make a lot of choices on the run, in the helter-skelter of our daily existence. You don't have time to think and ponder and consider all the factors. Putting all the potentially relevant data into your psyche every seven days (doing a thorough Weekly Review of your commitments, areas of focus, someday maybe's, time-based commitments, etc.) hard-wires your intuitive intelligence, which allows you trust (vs. hope) in your quick judgment calls.
3. Positive outcome focus as a way to create what you want is not just a hope-it-works belief—it's verifiable as a tool to put your unconscious thinking to work. The reticular activating system in the brain—the part of our neurology that gets programmed to recognize patterns, based upon our focus and identifications with images and outcomes—gets us to see and think things otherwise inaccessible. Now we have good data to prove that this not only impacts our conscious perceptions, but also (and perhaps more importantly) our unconscious integrative processes.

Innovation Requires Project-Based Work: Creativity Needs Constraints

This is an insightful video from the Swedish magazine/web site Innovation Management.

In product development, Google’s Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, believes that a small amount of constraint – whether in file size, pixels, or speed – fosters a lot of innovation. The lesson she shares? Too much creative freedom can make creativity unfocused. A solution with a strict set of barriers yields more concrete solutions.

Presentations Rule--use this to guide the next one

Leaders of complex global projects and programs have to make presentations in 3 organizational dimensions:

1. To their executives and sponsors
2. To their peers
3. To those they lead

All of these are critical for success requiring levels of nuance and design.  Nancy Duarte (Duarte Design) excels in the design of presentations that matter.  See her site for examples and learn from her two excellent books:  Slide:ology and Resonate.

The Presentation Landscape is one of her many tools (download here).  It provides an effective means of determining what needs to be done given the type of presentation required.  Go forth and present!

Visual Meetings and VisualTeams--Read, Use, and Learn

Dave Sibbet of Grove Consultants has delivered two excellent books for leaders and members of complex, distributed teams (how work gets done these days).  This web site provides further details and there are also brief videos on each book.

These two books provide a wealth of information, easily accessible and usable.  The focus on using visuals and graphics to improve team performance and the critical meetings that we must have for full collaboration and success.  Visual Teams explores a wide range of tools, for example(from the Amazon review):

Same Time/Same Place—Face-to-Face Meetings
 The tools explored in Visual Teams for this team mode are:
• Graphic recording on large paper
• Static and interactive whiteboards and multi-touch screens (and walls)
• Computer projection of idea mapping, flow charting, and other software
• Predesigned presentation murals and charts
• Wall and tabletop graphic templates
• Workbooks, worksheets, and handouts
• Sticky-note displays
• Decision-support software for electronic brainstorming, voting, and ranking
• Tablet computers for active graphic recording that is projected

Same Time/Different Place —Virtual Meetings
Many face-to-face meeting involve a virtual component with several people calling in. Its tools are:

• Teleconferences with target documents
• Web conferences with shared whiteboards and interactive presentations
• Web conferences with active recording on tablets
• Video conferences with telepresence and interactive whiteboards integrated
• Interactive whiteboards and telephones
• Live chat with or without video
• Browser-based decision-support software

Different Time—Same Place Meetings
This brings us back to a physical office or workspace. When teams are collocated they can communicate visually through the physical environment in ways that allow coworkers to see what is going on at different times. These tools include:

• Physical bulletin boards and project-management walls
• Posters
• Posted action plans and road maps
• Team rooms with displays
• Kiosks—physical and electronic

Anytime/Anyplace—Social Media and Cloud Computing
With cameras on smart phones and tablets, wifi and other Internet connects becoming universal, and data access from the cloud expanding exponentially, the “anytime/anyplace” possibility is becoming reality. Some of the tools that specifically make this possible are:

• Texting
• Video and photo sharing
• Teleconferencing on smart phones
• All the above plus drawings on smart tablets
• Coordinating through cloud computing services
• Mobile appliances of increasing variety

What is your project?...Really?

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, HP CEO Meg Whitman nailed it: 

"I want to be able to answer the question what is H-P very crisply."

In our work with global corporations in the Fortune 500, we are continually amazed by how hard it is for leaders of large projects to, in Whitman's word, crisply explain what their project is and the value it brings to the company. Questions to help you be able to crisply define your project should consider:

• Can you explain what the project is in a 1 minute conversation with your CEO?  If not, why not?
• Can your core team explain what the project is in a 1 minute conversation with their teams?  If not, why not?
• Can any member of your project team explain what the project is in a 1 minute conversation with their peers?  If not, why not?
• What specifically does "done" look like?  Do all stakeholders know that and agree to it?

Think twice before blindly using benchmarking data

Could not have said it better---Harvard Business Review post on benchmarking:

Best practices are alluring. If other companies have already determined the best way to do something, why not just do what they did? But before you run off to collect best practices from the leader in your industry, ask these three questions:

• What are the downsides? Implementing a practice that worked elsewhere isn't necessarily a slam dunk. Think through the potential disadvantages and figure out how to mitigate them.
• Is success truly attributable to the benchmark practice? There are many reasons a company succeeds. It is unlikely that emulating one practice of an industry leader will give your company the same success.
• Are the conditions similar at your organization? For best practices to be transferable, businesses need to have key similarities: strategy, business model,
  and workforce.

 I would also suggest looking at the culture and structure of the organization and the countries (and cultures) in which they operate.

Every Program Needs A Theme...can your team articulate it easily?

In a recent HBR Interview, Francis Ford Coppola was asked:

When you get stuck creatively—if you don’t know where a script should go or how a movie should end—how do you get yourself unstuck?

Well, if my intuition and asking what feels better doesn’t give me the answer, I have a little exercise: What is the theme in a word or two? In The Conversation, it was privacy. In The Godfather, it was succession. I encourage my children to do the same, to break it all down: If you have that word, then when you reach an impasse, you just say: “Well, what does the theme tell me? Should it be this or should it be that?” And usually that will suggest to you which way to go and break the roadblock.

I was struck but how important it is that your complex program, project, or initiative has a theme that:

• captures the essence of what you are doing
• "travels well" through internal and external social media
• can be easily articulated by any team member

Winning Management Innovation Ideas to Learn and Apply

The Harvard Business Review-McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation sought practices and disruptive ideas that can make organizations more adaptable, innovative, inspiring, and accountable. Gary Hamel and team provide an excellent web site for applicable tools and approaches that any leader of large programs will benefits from. Examples of winners include:

The Deliberative Corporation James Fishkin and Bobby Fishkin. The "deliberative polling" approach, which combines deep, in-person discussions with broad-based online contribution, offers a compelling alternative to top-down direction-setting, resolves conflict and eliminates the need for "buy-in."

The Colleague Letter of Understanding: Replacing Jobs with Commitments
(Paul Green) Morning Star is one of the world's leading processors of tomatoes--and one of the most progressive models of a self-managed enterprise. At the heart of this peer-regulated collection of colleagues who determine their own roles and responsibilities is the "Colleague Letter of Understanding" or CLOU.

Nobody's as Smart as Everybody--Unleashing Individual Brilliance and Aligning Collective Genius (Jim Lavoie) Software company Rite-Solutions has developed a state-of-the-art "innovation engine"-- dynamic marketplace for idea generation and development in which all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas.

Entangled Talents: a 21st-century Social Learning System (Frederic Leconte) Leading manufacturer of eyeglass lenses, Essilor, transforms cursory, standardized training into a dynamic, collaborative, peer-driven, Web-enabled platform for sharing knowledge and experience. The LOFT (Learning Organization for Tomorrow) program is a collection of initiatives and tools designed to promote locally-grown insights and practices and to turn shop floor workers into peer coaches (some 810 volunteers at 102 sites in 40 countries). The result: new ideas and transformative practices speed around the world horizontally (rather than top-down) and formerly disengaged employees are energized by the opportunity to contribute and learn from their peers.

Shift Changes the Way Cemex Works (Gilberto Garcia, Miguel Angel Lozano Martinez, and Arturo San Vicente) Global building materials company Cemex embraces the "Collaboration Revolution" with a multi-pronged effort to shift behaviors toward more openness, transparency, meritocracy, and community. To accelerate that transformation, the company launched a social platform (called "Shift") to harvest ideas and inject agility into crucial projects. In just eighteen months, Shift has involved some 20,500 people, generated more than 500 self-organizing communities of interest (on topics from sustainability to health and safety), sparked the rapid-fire launch of new products (including a global brand of ready-mix products), and engaged hundreds of employees around the world in defining strategic priorities for the next century.

Civil Servants Cut through the Red Tape and Share Government Forward (Kim Spinder) Dutch Ministry employee Kim Spinder devised a seemingly simple hack of work with a potentially radical impact: civil servants across the Netherlands are invited to share their workspaces, expertise, and resources via a Web booking system and a set of social tools (www.deelstoel.nl). Deelstoel ("share chair" in Dutch) doesn't just aim to share space but to align civil servants with each other and with the communities they serve. The initiative promotes both flexibility and "presence" where it counts, and generates spontaneous connection and collaboration among co-workers and constituents who were previously invisible to each other.