Being Stategic Every Day

Being Strategic means considering whether our current actions move us towards a desired scenario in the future.

I have led corporate strategy for a large company and have always though strange that a 2000-people organization would dedicate 6 people to strategy. Does that mean the other 1994 are not?

Unfortunately, it does.

The CEO says: strategy is very important, but.... we really need to close this quarter, so would like us to focus on delivering the results we need.

Because the cost of communication through the hierarchical layers and collaboration across functional silos is very high, it is more efficient to break the vision into smaller partial goals and ask people to ignore vision and focus on partial metrics of performance.

Because the data workflows are serial and the measurement and analytical methods are primitive, the strategic loop has a long time lag and vision and strategies can only be revised in the long-term (typically in intervals of 6 months or a year).

Strategy is about making decisions that are thoughtful and deliberate, based on the vision of desired results. Strategy is not meant to be inefficient or long-term. The classical business model imposes that.

Adoption of social computing technologies promise to reduce the cost of communication/collaboration and deliver analytical data in real-time to people making decisions at any level.

Social Computing technologies can shorten the strategic loop, break the information silos and let everyone make decisions with visibility.

Being strategic every day keeps the doctor away.