Disrupting Traditional Approaches to Business Strategy

 

582. Strategy Mavericks

SPEAKERS

Rob McLean, Will Bachman, Alex Smith, Lisa Carlin

 

Will Bachman  00:00

Hello and welcome to Unleashed. I’m your host will Bachman. Today’s episode is a recording of a panel discussion that I was on as a panelist. The discussion topic was strategy Mavericks, disrupting traditional approaches to business strategy. I’m appreciative of Lisa Carlin, who was the chair and organizer of this event. And it was really fun to meet the other panelists, Rob McLean and Alex M. H. Smith, who are both introduced on the episode introduce themselves. So without further ado, here is that panel discussion, please. Hi, everyone. Nice to see all. Hello, indeed.

 

Lisa Carlin  00:44

So, welcome to our session today. And tonight, depending on where you are in the world, we are going to have a discussion with three strategy Mavericks who are all challenging the world of strategy in different ways. Let me start by introducing myself. So I’m Lisa Carlin. I’m based in Sydney, and I’m director of future builders and also author of the newsletter Turbocharge weekly. So I’m a strategy execution specialist and I believe traditional strategy development gets staff offside before you’ve even began, which makes implementation harder. And I look forward to discussing this and more. I’m your chair for today and I’m pleased to introduce to you three panelists. Firstly, will batsman from New York, founder of Umbrex, a global community of over 5000 independent management consultants, and He’s author of the Chief Strategy Officer handbook. Hi, well, hello, good to meet everybody. We also have Alex MH Smith, based in London. Alex is a Breakthrough Strategist and author of no bullshit strategy. He has almost 80,000 followers on LinkedIn who love his work. Hi, Alex. Hello, hello. Nice to be here. Then we also I’m delighted to have Rob McLean am from Sydney Robson, author, investor and philanthropist. So Rob led the Australian New Zealand practice of McKinsey. He’s a former dean of the Australian Graduate School of Management, and he’s been awarded an Honorary Doctorate of business from UNSW. Hi, Rob. I’d also like to thank Claire Braun, I’m not sure if Claire’s online yet, please is CEO of women on boards who’s sponsoring our panel today. And in our Australian tradition, I acknowledge the original custodians of this land the Gadigal people and pay respects to elder’s past, present and emerging. I encourage you all to keep your cameras on and to keep yourself on mute and add your comments via the chat. Please hold your questions until the last 15 minutes. So just to provide some context. Over the years, I’ve seen many strategies not implemented. Some are just fluff with no real choice. Some are more analysis than strategy, and some are brilliant strategies but can’t be executed due to apathy or strong resistance. Over recent times, we’ve had additional challenges to strategies and their shelf life with volatility, uncertain business environment. And then there’s obviously the significant digital and AI disruption. So we thought tonight, we’ll start with the problem of strategy. And while our panel is answering this first question, I’m going to invite him around in the audience to insert your number one problem with strategy in the chat. So we can have a look at that. So let’s start with Rob. Rob, you’ve spent a great deal of your working life leading and McKinsey teams working on client strategies and then running the firm’s office in Australia, New Zealand. You’ve co authored two books on strategy with with Charles Khan, the latest being the in perfectionist strategic mindsets for uncertain times, and you can wave it in the air for us. What do you think is not working with the way strategy is traditionally developed?

 

Rob McLean  04:16

I think the the, the thing that comes to mind is that the strategy that that I worked on for many, many years was deterministic and assumed certainty. But increasingly, we have an uncertain world. And one of the sort of great surprises is I’ve never seen a business plan and strategy that actually had risk and probability attached to it. There’s assumptions about certainty, that deep down we just know aren’t true. And don’t hold. And the second part of this is that we’ve got very fast change, and the cadence of strategy is changing. as well. And yet, we see so many enterprises locked into three and five year plans as their modus operandi. So there’s a lot of the old architecture and way of going about things that we’ve set out to challenge, particularly in our most recent book.

 

Lisa Carlin  05:21

Thank you. And Alex, your book, no BS strategy is a frank and honest expose, as you say, most strategy is less fated bullshit, a fancy bunch bunch of sorry, I’m quoting you a bunch of fancy words, which mean nothing at all. Tell us what you mean there? What’s wrong with strategy?

 

Alex Smith  05:43

Well, well, I think that the first thing to point out is that once you get to a certain high echelon of business, and the sort of things that, you know, well, for example, Robin will have been working on whatever I think I don’t see any real problems up there. Like I think that businesses above a certain size, do tend to understand strategy and have the resources to do it properly, etc, etc. But once you get under a certain size, and we’re not talking like sort of mom and pop businesses, we’re talking like, I would say, let’s say 500 million and below, it’s not so much that they it’s not so much that they’re bad at it as that they don’t do it at all. The the lack of understanding of the field is absolutely shocking. And obviously, this leads to all those sort of BS strategies and sort of existing in that, in that realm, where, essentially, you know, people are just doing strategies, which, which aren’t actually strategies, let alone being simply bad strategies. And so I suppose that, because I, because I’ve sort of like come at the industry from the bottom up. So I haven’t, you know, I haven’t sort of worked at the top of the industry, I’ve only sort of worked, worked at the bottom of the industry. And so I’ve sort of been seeing things from that perspective. And basically, the thrust of my work is thinking about, Okay, well, how can we make these, these these precepts accessible, and engaging and interesting and usable for your sort of medium sized businesses? Because that is where the true vacuum? In my, in my estimation, lies? And, and you know, you don’t actually, so a lot of I get being super frank about it, a lot of what I do in my book and my posts and stuff, you could argue that it’s kind of in some sense, dumbed down strategy. But that’s kind of the point because it doesn’t need to be right, so much as it needs to be something which is more right than what they’re currently doing. And that will actually get people to start engaging and taking action. So that’s the kind of focus I suppose of, of my work. But certainly, yes, I would not, I definitely wouldn’t want it to be seen to me to say that traditional strategy is bullshit. It most certainly is not. It’s just, it has limited purchase as you drop down the scales of business.

 

Lisa Carlin  08:17

Right. So, so that’s interesting. So I’m hearing, you know, a lot of emphasis there, Alex, on on on the need to take action. And I think that’s echoed in some of the comments that I’m seeing on the, you know, in the chat. I particularly like Joni, Jordans comment, culture is everything, which has certainly been been my my experience. Let’s, let’s move on to some new approaches. And we’ll let some turn to you. Now you’ve got one of the largest global networks of independent consultants, and most of them are from McKinsey, and BCG and Bain. So and then you match them with executives who want high quality strategy and project work. So you see a lot of these projects coming past your desk. I saw 30 in in the last week’s email, on your email, all these excellent, you know, these these opportunities every week. What do you see as the main trends in what executives are looking for in their strategy process? Well, thanks, Lisa.

 

Will Bachman  09:21

And before I answer, I’ll also put out a request for all the people attending today. It’s before you drop off at the end of today’s session, it would be so helpful. If you could pop in the chat. Just one thing that you took away from today, either one thing you found surprising or helpful or that you’ll do on Monday. It’s always interesting to presenters to know like what what resonated I’m sure Lisa would also love to know like, sometimes it could be an offhand comment. So if you could just sort of keep that in mind through the Congress. Session today and, and be prepared at the end that pops something in the chat. I guess my answer to your question Lisa is surprising is, unfortunately, quite boring. So I have about 10 conversations a week with clients who are looking for an independent consultant. So I have the benefit of 500 conversations per year with clients who are looking for consultant. And the Frank answer is, it’s actually an I’ve been doing this for 15 years. So it actually is not changed that much what people are looking for is, and I hear almost the same thing, every single conversation, we’re looking for someone who can roll up their sleeves, we’re looking for someone who can convert conversations into action, right? So it’s not so much today that there’s something dramatically new. In the world, people are looking for someone who can, you know, not just, you know, engage in good conversation or come up with good ideas, but very much clients are looking for someone who can sit in a meeting. And then, you know, immediately afterward, turn that into documentation, turn that into deliverables, and then turn those deliverables into actual change in their organization. And one thing that people can do is practice. After meetings, like just sending out meeting recap, with not just notes, but okay, here’s clear action items, who’s going to do what? Second, you know, slightly different thing, as I’d say is, everyone should be a little bit sensitive to the idea that strategy, consultants think about the incentives, strategy, consultants have an incentive to complexify strategy. Right? If strategy is super simple and straightforward to do, then anyone can do it. So people who are making a living selling strategy work want to say no, we have the latest, greatest approach. And, you know, ours is we need dynamic, changing rap, you know, strategy, the cutting edge. Whereas just doing the basic, basic blocking and tackling if you can ask all 10, you know, senior executives independently to write down, what is your company’s strategy? You know, what is your definition of winning? Where do you play? How do you win? If they all could write that down and have the same answer, you would be ahead of the majority of firms? Right, just having alignment and clarity on what your strategy is. Thank you, Lisa. Back to you.

 

Lisa Carlin  12:46

Right alignment, and clarity. Okay, so seeing some signs, see some themes, emerging alignment, clarity and action, which is echoing what Alex was saying. Alex, tell us some what strategists need to do to avoid the space term that you talk about any new approaches that you use, or any any ideas that you can share to avoid that. That BS?

 

Alex Smith  13:11

Bad? Yeah, I mean, without, without obviously getting into the weeds about sort of what is and isn’t strategy and all that which, which, which we can do, but that’s a whole sort of, that’s the whole sort of conversation in itself. There’s, there’s an obvious point, and there’s a less obvious point, the obvious point is that, like a sales strategy needs to be a strategy, it needs to have substance and it needs to as well. So to basically be convert to an act as opposed to an aspiration, you know, I mean, like, it’s sort of like, if you, if you want to lose weight, that’s actually that’s an aspiration. And it’s a bit unclear on what you do. But if you say, Alright, stop eating sugar, for sake of argument, that’s an act. And it’s like, it may or may not be a good strategy for losing weight, but at least it’s the thing that you can do. So then there’s something that you can actually hold on to, and people can say, oh, yeah, I’ll just do that. and off you go. So it’s that kind of like shift is the first thing in terms of actually getting people to you. If you want people to do something, you have to tell them what to do. Sounds like so stupid, but that’s basically actually like, the thing that is so often missing, like, you want people to do something, but you don’t tell them what to do. Right. So, so So that’s kind of like the first hurdle. And then the second hurdle, which I think is a bit more unusual. I think that there is a massive, massive under emphasis on style, in strategy, the style of presentation, the charisma of ideas, the storytelling, all of that kind of stuff, you know, we understand? Well, I say we said, in principle, most businesses understand that when you’re talking to a consumer, you need to speak to them in a sort of like a compelling way. You can’t just say, buy this product because it makes sense for XYZ reasons. But when we’re doing internal comms, we, we lose all of that. And we think that actually, we really need to treat the teams inside with the same level of sort of care and stylistic attention. As we treat external consumers, I think we probably overestimate people’s ability to grasp abstractions, people’s interest in strategy, I think that 80% of people just quite simply couldn’t care less their brain doesn’t work that way. They’re sort of geared in different directions. And so even if you have this fabulous strategy, and you lay it out to people, boom, boom, boom, here’s, here’s what we’re gonna do for a lot of people that sort of goes in one ear and out the other. And so I think that things get lost there. But if you actually focus a bit more on for want of a better term, sort of sexing up the strategy, then you can you can make it you can make an awful lot more, more progress. And, yeah, I suppose that like, because there is this, there’s this huge emphasis from strategists, I would say, on making strategy, right. But there’s almost no emphasis on making strategy. Interesting. But if you conceive of strategy as being a motivational discipline, which when you think about it, logically it is, because you don’t just have to figure out what to do. But you have to motivate people to do it. If you see your role as being a little bit like a sort of Tony Robbins type role within the within the thing where it’s yes, fine, you tell people what to do, but you actually got to light a fire under them, otherwise, they’re never going to do it. I think that changes the complexion of the project quite a lot. And then you start to, I think, then you start to make that you start to see more clearly why a lot of good strategies fall away, because no effort at all has been placed on making this making people engage with the idea.

 

Lisa Carlin  17:01

Interesting, and I, you know, Alex, you’re very much known for your, you know, you’ve got close to 80,000 fans on level Hall and fans on LinkedIn who clearly love you. And, you know, for your the way you have taken strategy and made it so simple to understand and make made it feel like it’s in everybody’s reach, which is why I so much wanted you to be part of this conversation. So Rob, you know, X McKinsey will comes from McKinsey, I spent some early in my early career was at McKinsey. And so we have a particular, you know, you have a particular lens around how you taught strategy, if you like, and, and I think one of the exciting things you’ve done is really make it quite easy to understand. And I can almost see that term that you’ve just mentioned, popping up on all over LinkedIn, six up the strategy to make more progress or written down. Yes. So Rob, any any comments on that, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about the approach that you’ve got in your in your book, and then particularly addresses the uncertainty aspects in the book that in perfectionist, and you’ve also folks who who read Harvard Business Review would have seen Rob authored in there as well, what what’s different going forward?

 

Rob McLean  18:31

Well, maybe if I start with what isn’t what’s unchanged, and that is, I’ve always viewed strategy as problem solving. Where you’ve got to define a problem or, as we say, near perfection as an audacious question. And then you bring different lenses to bear, you often seek to anchor outside the company or the industry that you’re in, given that we know that so much, with so much disruption, it’s going to come from outside your industry. But what’s new to me is that there’s a much greater premium on new data on trials and experiments. And the way our teams were set up in McKinsey to do that kind of work with clients really wasn’t ideal. And I’m sure it probably isn’t ideal today. Because experiments and trials and these kinds of things all take periods of time. And it probably doesn’t fit neatly into the blocks that we’ll was talking about earlier. You know, that assignments take. So the new strategy to us is a lot more of peeling back these layers of uncertainty, putting people in a in the position where they can take decisions evolve or strategy. And so for example, in the imperfection as we talk about how, you know, Amazon has built itself into You know, a 20% consumer share in in consumer payments, you know, through a series of moves, some of that failed others that they build on. And you don’t immediately see as a strategy, it’s only when you see it depicted over a 10 year period, you go, Oh, my goodness, that’s what they were doing. And that that is a really robust strategy. They were learning as they were going, they were taking bite sized pieces, they were taking steps backwards when they failed. And so this to me, you know, in the in the continued sense of strategy being about problem solving. But we’re adding these dimensions of how you deal with uncertainty, where the next step forward isn’t particularly clear. Just have one final comment. And Alex has touched on this in some of his writing, I continue to see so many presentations, where strategic intent is confused with strategy. strategic intent isn’t strategy. Strategy is that integrated set of actions that take you forward and build value and competitive advantage. But so many of the of the organizations that, that I see, seem to be happy just to leave it as a presentation about strategic intent,

 

Lisa Carlin  21:26

which is often where, you know, over the years I’ve come in, and then it’s not a strategy. And it’s really difficult to go straight into action, because there’s another whole chunk of work that needs to be done to make it more specific. But I’m interested, Rob, in what you said about peeling back uncertainty. So So what is it sort of that we need to do to deal with the fact that we can’t have, you know, these three to five year plans? You know, in concrete?

 

Rob McLean  21:58

Yeah, I’ve got a software company that I’m invested in, which has an AI data platform. And, you know, I’ve been pushing them around, whether their plans, they’re certainly not interested in five year plans, and not much interested in three year or one year plans. But they’ve evolved what they call continuous development. And it’s this notion of we’re learning every day from from partners and customers, you know, about the kind of offering that they want to have. And it seems to me this, that sort of way of thinking is much more in line with, with with with the way the world is now where you you break things down into chunks that you can, you know, you haven’t, you’re going to have clarity over the next 60 or 90 days, but you may not have much clarity about what you want to be doing in two years time.

 

Lisa Carlin  22:54

Interesting, any other at all want to come in on that one? So Sorry, go on. Yeah, go ahead.

 

23:08

No, no, I was just

 

Lisa Carlin  23:13

tell us a little bit more. I guess I’m a little bit confused. Now. So So you’re saying that, you know, having the high level strategic intent for kind of the big view, you know, of who we are, and you know, where we want to win, but then doing that continuous development within? I mean, there must be that’s the framework, right? There’s got to be some kind of framework to operate within, with all this continuous development, otherwise, you just, it’s just open slather with no real umbrella to it all?

 

Rob McLean  23:50

Well, but it’s, you know, it’s interesting, I was listening to, you know, the head of open AI the other day and, and he was just tears using words, like we’re just taking one step at a time, we don’t feel that we can see more than two years out. And so we’re focused on what we have visibility on. And, you know, that you can say that’s quite operational, but in you know, in his world and in the world that that I’m in with a lot of VC and private equity. That’s, they are strategic moves that have been made, you know, each 6090 days. That will that will form the future of three to five years. But it’s this almost this analogy we often use that strategy looks more like, more like rugby, where you know, you’re moving the ball forward, sometimes the balls going backwards. Sometimes you got to take steps backwards. So it is this this the end of the day. It’s this integrated set of actions, but it looks messy. It doesn’t look tidy. It does doesn’t look, you know, very top down or more strategic when it’s happening. But in fact it is.

 

Alex Smith  25:08

To me, this is one of the, I’m not entirely sure I’m on solid ground here, but I’ll chuck it out there anyway, I think this is one of the things that gives, again, those sort of medium sized businesses a huge challenge. And that makes the strategy literature very difficult to work with, because I think that that a lot of a lot of this is quite different. With an extremely big business like Amazon, versus a more sort of singular kind of und polar business, if you want to call it that, like, you know,

 

25:39

like a,

 

Alex Smith  25:40

like a single product or single brand, brand. whereby I think that to your point, Lisa, if you are a kind of, let’s just say for sake of argument, a cereal brand in the supermarket, and that’s the whole business is just like that brand, and that and that box of cereal or that range of cereals, then you do probably have a kind of a single point of strategic focus, which organizes your actions in quite a coherent way. Because ultimately, you’re ultimately all the actions need to be sort of building on and coherent with the brand that you’re kind of creating out there and the way that it relates to the category, etc, etc. With a business like open AI or Amazon that have got so many more parts and also so much more power, I think that you’d probably you don’t end up having that same level of sort of elegant simplicity, exactly as sort of Rob says. So I think that when you consider that so much of the strategy literature out there has been kind of constructed in order to be relevant to businesses like Amazon, which means that it has to be much sort of broader and more sophisticated. That that’s the kind of thing I think that makes it sort of inaccessible for for a single brand, founder or CEO, to get their to get their head around. I mean, this is something that I’ve found with, obviously, I’ve read like a few of the great strategy books and stuff. And the scale of businesses that they’re often talking about. It’s all like sort of General Electric, and Hey, guy in mines in Peru, and all of this sort of stuff, which is actually quite, it’s very hard to connect to those concerns with, I’m running a $50 million shoe brand, or something like that. So it’s that that gap there is is in and of itself, quite a big communication problem. And I don’t know if you guys think that’s right or not. I was just sort of making that up a bit.

 

Lisa Carlin  27:51

It does seem to sort of depend on the business. And we’ve got, you know, the business that you’re in, and I think, Rob, you’ve had quoted some tech firms. Alena Dale was saying, I was also asking that question, you know, depending depends on the type of business you’re in, right? Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  28:06

I would add something Lisa and fig in a slightly different direction in terms of what is different. And, you know, Rob mentioned open AI, I wanted just to build on that for a minute. That we should think about what sorts of skills for us as consultants or strategists are going to rise in status, and what relatively relatively lowers in status with the appearance of these tools? And I’d say that industry knowledge, lowers in status, functional knowledge, lowers and status. It’s a great equalizer, right used to be when I was at McKinsey, you would turn to the firm expert, and try to get time on that person’s calendar to explain to you how some industry works. So now, one of us can, you know, let’s say that we’re trying to, we have a project opportunity, energy industry, right energy storage industry, we know nothing about it. You could do a prompt to say, to attach EBT, or whatever tool you’re using, please take on the role of a senior partner at McKinsey in the energy practice, you’ve been asked by private equity firm, to provide an in depth presentation on everything you know about the energy storage industry. As a first step, please share the outline of your presentation. Right? And then you get the outline and great now for the first point, please provide an in depth script of what you would be telling the private equity firm on topic one topic to topic three, right? And now you’ve just given yourself 100 page report on the energy storage industry, saying you could do the same thing on some functional thing like how does post merger integration work for an energy storage company or for a cereal company to Alex’s point? What rises in status is those interstitials hills, right? What Allen’s is talking about about how to communicate and motivate people how to sell, right how to actually build alignment around people. So if you have that skill of really how to use these Gennai tools, I think that’s going to be essential to any consultant. And it’s not something you can just learn in an hour or two. It’s something that I think takes dozens, you know, over 100 hours of just practicing using these tools, testing out different prompts. There’s not like one way to do it. It’s sort of learning how to play a musical instrument. So maybe as we continue discussion, I’d be curious for people to pop in the chat, what tool have been using and and how have you been using it in your practice? A lot of people signed up right away and just played around with open AI and said, Oh, write me a Taylor Swift lyrics on some topic. But then they kind of dropped it, I’d be curious to see how people are using it in their practice. So so back to you, Lisa, as

 

Lisa Carlin  31:04

well. And it’s definitely really interesting to see how AI is changing strategy. So I follow Millennials newsletter, and then Lenny’s podcast, which is on one of the top 10 technology, podcasts. And his community is amazing as 50,000 of us and paid community. And we’re Lily’s been asked around strategy and how AI is going to impact it. Sorry, when Lenny’s asked around product managers, right, which is the function that he focuses on mainly, and how AI is going to impact it. He says the number one difference is going to be the number one impact is going to be strategy. So what I want to do before I move on to my next question is give you a 32nd advertising break and let you know that if you want any more information on strategy execution, that build stakeholder support, and not resistance, that is what I’m focused on. And I’ve got a two day bootcamp coming up in October. And I’m going to pop the link in the chat now. If anyone’s interested, you can register your interest. And I’ll send you a an outline so that that’s what’s in there. Now let’s move on to their people impact and dive in a bit more, because I see a lot of people getting worried when the CEO starts a new strategy project or the consultants come in to do some strategy work. That traditional work has been done in what I call the dark room. So this is where the consultants sit separately or the executives huddle in boardrooms and work out what the strategy is. And then they come out and only once it’s gone through approvals, and the board’s approved, it is then communicated to staff. So I’d love to know what your thoughts on that are. Who’d like to start us off? Rob, Alex will?

 

Alex Smith  33:00

Well, I’ll just be a bit provocative and difficult to say that. I mean, I don’t I don’t, I don’t really know. But I actually, I kind of like the dark room approach. The reason that I say that, I mean, I certainly don’t think it’s good politically. And I all the problems that you can list with it are definitely true. But my, my feeling is that you if a business is going to make some sort of like radical, meaningful move, that obviously isn’t going to be designed by committee, obviously, you can give people a feeling of involvement, you can talk to people make it feel like they’ve heard had their voice heard. But ultimately, there’s basically let’s face it, there’s going to be one person saying I think we should do X, if that’s going to be something exciting, and that person basically has to own it, and push it and so you sort of can’t really get away from a slightly autocratic approach. You know, I don’t think it’s a surprise that, you know, like, not to say that they are like the perfect behavioural role models, but like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are both what two of the greatest business strategic leaders of all time also complete tyrants in their businesses. I don’t actually think that’s like a coincidence. I think that it’s a sort of that it’s not a it’s not a bug, that’s a feature. But you know, that, obviously, they’re special cases, but I do think there’s something to learn there. I think that but even with that, because a single individual basically has to take responsibility for a really interesting, exciting strategic move. That I think is unavoidable. But obviously, the way that you then disseminate that and make people feel involved, you can make people feel warm to it and involved in it. Even if in truth, they really didn’t have anything to do with it. So it’s, um, it’s really like a politician, right? You know, like a great politician, makes their supporters feel like they are somehow intimately involved in their cause, when actually, if you really look at it coldly, they’re just the recipients of that message, rather than the originators of that message. So that would be my sense, but I could definitely be persuaded otherwise.

 

Lisa Carlin  35:24

Well, I definitely took exception when I saw the other day you put online something like rule like a dictator. But I think the answer

 

Alex Smith  35:33

is out of context. But it’s not true.

 

Lisa Carlin  35:36

So I think I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, because I also have an article called strategy is not democratic, so I wouldn’t advocate. Rob, what’s your view?

 

Rob McLean  35:47

Look, I think the I think the work of strategy is bifurcating quite a bit. And the kind of thing I’ve got an example in the book of an McKinsey team, we’re looking at new product areas, and they’ve they did something like 5000 expert calls in a minute using AI. And they they trolled around to find out where the patents were, and who developed them, you know, to give them insight as to you know, what areas that they wanted to push behind. So, there’s actually a whole new realm of dark room activity emerging via AI. But I would say on the other side, what I felt McKinsey teams did especially well was talking to the customer. And we’ll use this expression as well bringing Voice of the Customer perspectives and insight about new segments and different ways of, of competing. And if you add to it, what I’ve been talking about of running these trials and experiments to get new data and an insight that forces you to be working very, very closely to the front with the front line. Well,

 

Will Bachman  37:12

I’ll share a story. So I was a naval officer before I went to McKinsey. When I was a young ensign, I was a submarine officer, I was particularly impressed by one of the senior junior officers on board he was a lieutenant and been on board for four or five years or three years, and he could run the entire boat on you know, in port as the duty officer from the wardroom right, people would come to him for permission to do work, he’d sign their sign their tagout, give them permission, he could run the whole day from the boardroom. And I was so impressed with that. I was telling an engineer officer who is our boss, a department head is so impressive, Jeff knows the boats so well. He can just he knows what’s going on. And the engineers said, Jeff is the laziest worst junior officer on board, you should not be a role model, what I want you to do is go put your eyeballs on the job site, right, get back in there in the engine room, down the builds, look at what they’re working on, put your eyeballs on the job site. So I think that that is what consultants and strategists need to do. So we do need to get the insights of the people at the front lines, right. You can’t do that from the boardroom, you can’t do that from the team room, at the corporate headquarters, you need to go out there and get the insights and the people who are touching the customers and the people, you know, at the production floor. But I don’t think those people necessarily have the view to decide where the company should go next. Right? My captain did not ask the injured lower level watch where we should steer the ship. But we still want to get the insights of the frontline.

 

Alex Smith  39:12

Ability to shave actually, the way that you put it. I mean, it’s, I guess, like, the straightforward way of thinking about it is that it’s a sort of hourglass shaped process, if you can picture that, where you’ve got to begin by gathering information from everybody and then they feel involved. But exactly as well said, let’s be real, they’re not about to drop some sort of strategy bomb on you, that just gonna give you relevant evidence to chew over. Then you basically go away onto your proverbial yacht, and like and sort of think about it and look at the angles and actually, like have the core idea, let’s say, and then after that, you can bring it back to the people and you can say, alright, well, in the macro, this is what we’re going to do and then you can hand responsibility back to them by saying in your particular role in your particular department. What do you think this would look like? So they do get they have some sort of executional ideation power, if not sort of like strategic power. So that that feels like a sort of common sensical way to do it. I guess.

 

Lisa Carlin  40:14

That’s beautifully put Alex, I call it the negotiables and the non negotiables. And that’s why things are not democratic. Okay, I’m just looking at the time, and I want to allow some time for questions. So I’m gonna ask you each to, to let’s look at some practical advice. Okay. So you’ve had lots of learnings across all of this. If you could summarize it for us into one or two key things. What are one recommend? Let’s make it one recommendation you’d make to those here that are interested in in strategy, developing strategy, what what are they? What have what must they get? Right? Rob?

 

Rob McLean  40:56

Although, I come back to the fact of it really has to be a problem solving activity that explicitly recognizes uncertainty. And we have an approach where you tolerate ambiguity, you take steps forward, feeling the stones beneath your feet. And this is this is this is not yes, it yes, it’s Amazon. And yes, it’s SpaceX. But it’s also quite small companies that I’m seeing and, you know, software and education and things like that. And that’s to me, is this new world of strategy that we don’t talk enough about? Bridge the reality?

 

Alex Smith  41:35

Thank you, Alex. I quite like the challenge to boil it down to one thing. So I guess that one thing I think would be it sounds too obvious to say. And yet, at the end of the day, this is what never will not, what constantly doesn’t happen is if you want your results to change, then you have to change something mean, at this most brutal and basic level, just change something. And whether it’s even strategically good, is actually very, very secondary, because the issue that most people have is that they actually don’t really change anything, they sort of they play act at changing things, whilst nothing meaningful ever changes. And then like, whom I don’t understand why, why our results are improving, when literally nothing meaningful has changed over the course of that, that that so called strategy process. So even if you’re like the most and strategic thinker on the entire planet, at the very least, if you just change something in the business, from x to y, then different things will happen. And maybe there’ll be better, maybe there’ll be worse. But it’s the only way that you can actually really expect some form of movement. So yeah, crazy that it needs to be said. But it doesn’t need to be said.

 

Lisa Carlin  42:57

Right. And I invite everybody to put their questions in the chat, because we’ve got some time for questions. Let me turn to will last to answer that question. On one thing, people left. Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  43:08

please. I’d say it’s a cousin of what Alex said, which is really implementation. So like, from my viewpoint, in terms of the client conversations that we’re having, what they’re looking for, the number of requests that we get, for actual strategy development is down. But the number of requests that we get for a consultant to help with strategy implementation, or strategic execution, or Transformation Office is way up. So I think that, you know, companies are realizing that they need to put, you know, even more resources into actually implementation, transformation, office strategy execution, to actually make the change happen.

 

Lisa Carlin  43:55

Thank you, we’ll, so I’m just looking through, or you’ve got some time for questions, and I’m looking through through those. I just before I go to the question, I wouldn’t mind going through a comment here. So Mark dipple, who is from the Netherlands, he’s saying execute like a dictator. When strategy creation becomes the work of a dictator things go wrong. What do we think about that? Anyone want to comment on the panel?

 

Alex Smith  44:27

Given that I was the dictator advocate. I mean, the subtlety there is execute like a dictator. That would definitely be bad. That would definitely be bad. I would say sort of, kind of think or lead like a dictator, maybe. I mean, he doesn’t there’s probably a more positive word than dictator that ultimately boils down to the same thing. But yes, I guess that comes back to the hourglass thing that like, people need to be empowered to, to execute it. in their, in their own way, provided a bit of course, it’s that it’s aligned with strategy again, you know, like, it’s a trite example. But like, Johnny, if Apple was empowered by Steve Jobs, to do what he did best, but within the guardrails that Jobs had laid down to him. So like, that’s, to me, that is a good balance. Right?

 

Lisa Carlin  45:30

So we’ve met a question here. How do you feel from Elena Dale? How do you feel? How do you help people feel comfortable with uncertainty? I’d like to take that one.

 

Rob McLean  45:46

I’ll have a go at that. And I think the this is really quite an important role for for senior management and team leaders. Which is to say it’s okay, to say, we don’t know enough now to make a really big move forward, or we made the we may have to wait, or we need a strategy for laying off off risk in order to move forward. But I think if you don’t do that, you know, we’re kidding ourselves about, you know, the real risks that we’re taking. And as we saw in COVID, a lot of companies just put things on ice. And then other companies made made faster progress going ahead, because they were better able to, to handle uncertainty and the ambiguity that we thought during that period. So it does go back to this comment I made earlier of, have you ever seen a business plan with probabilities attached to it? No. Why? Why would that be the case? Because we just feel more comfortable pretending that the world is certain when it isn’t.

 

Will Bachman  46:54

I love it. When I see news headlines that say something like, you know, we’re living in unprecedented times. Because you never see one that says we’re living in precedented times, right? I made a t shirt. For myself, I have this thing where I make T shirts and put little sayings on that I want to remember one t shirt that I made for myself. It says everything important is uncertain. So I don’t think we necessarily need to get people comfortable with uncertainty. We just need people to say, look, uncertainty is a fact of life, and we got to live with it. You don’t have to be comfortable with it. But it is just it is this thing to deal with it. Well,

 

Lisa Carlin  47:33

I want to see you with a picture of you and that T shirt on LinkedIn next week. Okay, there’s your challenge. I love that everything important is uncertain. Okay. Let’s go to another question that we’ve got here. This is from a funny word DeAnza. I am after we create strategy development and do implementation, how if the results are not all good, what’s your best suggestion to start doing monitoring, evaluation improvement? So monitoring, evaluation improvement? How do we do that? That sort of monitoring and fine tuning during implementation? Any suggestions?

 

Will Bachman  48:22

Love to hear Rob weigh in on that?

 

Rob McLean  48:26

Oh, look, I that that was of course, this stuff of so much of what we did to at McKinsey, and you never feel that it’s being done, you know, as well as as you’d like it to be. And there was always a huge dilemma. In the, you know, the the cost is very high, you know, to keep McKinsey people around, you know, right through through implementation. But on the other hand, the risks go up, you know, when you when you when you leave earlier than you would like to? I’m sure we’ll deal with that every day of the week.

 

Lisa Carlin  49:02

Yeah. That makes it hard. I actually don’t see a lot of I was having a conversation about measurement. And, you know, how do you actually measure the impact of what you’re doing? So you know, what’s working and what’s not working? And in implementation, I don’t see a lot of that actually, people implement things, and then it’s done, and they move on. So I definitely think, folks can we can do a better job at that.

 

Alex Smith  49:31

Yeah, there are exceptions. I think there are exceptions to this. But broadly speaking, I kind of think that if you’re going back to the change point, if you actually change something that means it’s meaningful, you’re probably it’s reasonable to expect almost immediate feedback. And really, I think that you should be if it’s a sort of strategically meaningful change, then it’s reasonable to expect immediate positive If feedback, and obviously, there’s a theoretical scenario where you might get short term negative long term positive, but like, if we just exclude, exclude that for a second, I think that you should be able to just make fairly low risk small moves or changes or actions, and be able to find out pretty quickly, whether it’s sort of positive or negative, that, I would say that that would apply to pulling a number out my ass seven out of 10, these sorts of videos. So, like, on the projects that I on the projects that I work on, you’re quite often find something that the guys in the business can do, almost immediately, that will at least give a bit of signal back from the market or whatever it might be. And so if you can find something like that, well, then you might as well do it, and then you can sort of like start to push on with more confidence after that. But whether it’s good or bad, it should be kind of obvious, I think, because if nothing really happens again, I will go back to well, have you actually changed anything?

 

Lisa Carlin  51:17

And Chris Fox is saying yeah, which is spot on the feedback you need is not did we do what we said we would do, but did it achieve the outcome we thought it would achieve? Absolutely, Chris. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Just looking through and see if there any last questions that I think we’ve covered most of these, it’s been a really interesting conversation. Thank you all for your comments, which is certainly enrich the discussion. If I can just wrap us up. Now, I think what I’ll do is I’ll send around the recording. For folks who wanted I’ll send the recording through, it’ll come through my turbo charge weekly, which is my weekly newsletter, so if you aren’t receiving it, or if you’ve unsubscribed, make sure you subscribe to that, I’ll just put the link in. Otherwise, you won’t, you won’t get that or invitations to the next one. The next one will be on on AI. And so Mark dipple, who’s on the line here who’s CEO of a tool called circle attics, we are going to be doing a virtual Roundtable, a leader roundtable on the topic of AI using an AI tool and also using the opinion of AI because as well as talking about we can inject the opinion from Ai l you know the expert opinion and put that into the mix and and see what we come up with. So I’ll invite you to to be part of that very soon. And I think if I can just pull out one quote here I particularly like the one sets up the strategy to make more progress that came from from from Alex. I like Rob’s T wills t shirt and I would very much like to see that on on LinkedIn. Everything important is uncertain. And from Rob It’s just that importance of of taking into account uncertainty and making sure that we we have a mechanism to do that with probabilities. Thank you all very much our panelists who’ve been amazing if you want to turn off your turn on your your audience and just give them a round of applause that was just amazing. Thank you guys.

 

Will Bachman  53:43

And Lisa before people drop off, I see we got 79 still here with us. It would be great if people could pop in the chat just like what was your

 

Lisa Carlin  53:52

takeaways? Thanks for reminding me. Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  53:56

it’s always really fascinating to see what resonates from the discussion.

 

Lisa Carlin  54:02

middle sized companies usually don’t have a strategy there you go and the Alba blots fantastic. see them coming through. There are no straightforward answers. The world’s increased demand for Transformation Office and implementation six up the strategy.

 

Alex Smith  54:26

Our buddy Hal will Who are these like 500 people contacting you every year like I’d be I’d be happy to have 510 10

 

Will Bachman  54:37

years to overnight success. Yeah,

 

Alex Smith  54:43

it’s one of those

 

Lisa Carlin  54:46

results to change then you need to change something that’s right hands and my takeout from Janie love the quote about everything uncertain as important. That’s gold. Will implementation is key from Leann Farnworth. To repol get comfortable with uncertainty strategy sometimes are more intent or not actual strategy. Jol reima. Uncertainty is a constant, not a roadblock. Thank you, Chris. Great sharing of experiences. Thank you all. Julie, if you want results to change, you need to change something. And so the list goes on. Joe cutbush Thank you implementation is so much more important than strategy itself. The assumptions about certainty and strategy that just don’t hold everything important is uncertain from Robert Welch and Alex there’s so much emphasis on making strategy right? But there’s no emphasis on making strategy interesting. It needs style and charisma to make people act rubs uncertainty, Sandy OLIO decrease of importance in functional and industry knowledge. Thank you, Sandy. The idea of experimentation from Richard Kingston Martin Gillespie strategy starts with optimal metabolic health of the individuals involved Thank you. Neil. Man winner it comes to strategy the future isn’t something that happens to us the future is something we do very wise. Eileen Pippins Hello, Eileen takeaways, implementation looks different and impacted by engagement. Thank you, Tim kiss takeaway is that strategy involves discipline and discomfort. Daniel Fogarty, Hi, Daniel. peel back the layers of uncertainty. David Dibble with skills that will become more important selling and motivating strategy implementation. Why did we not talk about pacing, David Dibble, you’ll have to expand that one and just a whole lot of thank yous and lean into the discomfort. Thank you, everyone. I’ll summarize those internal charge weekly in the in the weeks to come. Thank you all for participating. It’s been a great

 

Rob McLean  57:04

thanks. Bye.

 

57:08

Thank you. Bye. Bye bye.