Tony Grundy - Demystifying Strategy: How to Become a Strategic Thinker

This ebook published in 2011 by

Kogan Page Limited

120 Pentonville Road

London N1 9JN

UK

www.koganpage.com

Tony Grundy, 2012

E-ISBN 978 0 7494 6569 8

Contents

Why did I write this book? Lets explore...

When I first began to have an interest in strategy in the late 1970s and early 1980s the discipline was relatively simple and straightforward. At that time there were the embryonic germs of later thinking in terms of having a longer-term planning process, understanding competitive positioning and also the relative attractiveness of different markets and industries.

Since then, strategy has become a lot more complex and arguably far too much so: making it hard for the layperson who might even be a CEO to get their head around. Also, many, though not all, strategy professors and consultants often over-conceptualize it, and cloud it in unnecessary jargon. Even books that start off in a reasonably simple and straightforward way rapidly become increasingly weighed down by complexity as if the writers cannot fail to become intoxicated by the ornate nature of the discipline. I will be avoiding that.

In my view, strategy such a simple term has become entangled with conceptual overgrowth. As a result, end users of the language of strategy end up saying things in real business situations without much real meaning at all. Do you, as the reader, recognize that, for example when someone says something about the strategy and you simply dont get it?

To paraphrase Christopher Robin in the first chapter of the first book of Winnie-the-Pooh stories: I wish there was a better way, if only I could think of it. This book is therefore based on three main premises:

1. that strategy can and must be demystified in order for it to add real insight and value;
2. that instead of strategy being the domain of a few masters located in the esoteric towers of business schools, or in some impressive and palatial London West End office block, most of us can unlock the power of strategic thinking that lies as a potential within us;
3. that a single book can equip you with the reference points and flagpoles that you will refer back to over many years in order to turn difficult strategic situations into simple and successful strategies to lift your career.

I felt to answer my opening question that the existing books on strategy underemphasized the practical nature of the subject and didnt really engage the reader as practitioner sufficiently to cause a real shift in thinking and one that was reflected in changed management activity. Also, by and large, they fail to express its core principles in as simple a way as possible.

My dream was that I could distil the wisdom of strategy in a sufficiently transparent way to get my readers to appreciate its essence in a way similar to how I was opened up to it over the past 30 years. The difference is that having got to this point, I can help you to get there much faster than it took me, particularly in developing your strategic thinking capability. I aim to open up a new voice in your head one that you might feel as being, as it were, your strategic conscience that will kick in when you are approaching a problem or an issue in too tactical a way.

This books main audience are practising managers who want to get inside strategy and learn about strategic thinking without taking a long course, or as a refresher. These will be managers, probably in senior positions, with responsibility for developing the strategy, or implementing it.

A secondary group of people are those who would have liked to have done an MBA but practicalities or cost precluded it the MBA bypass segment. Then there are those who completed an MBA but feel a need for the strategy piece to come more together, or to be related to their practice.

Finally there might be MBA students who find the conventional books too dry and want to have a lot more on how to do it. They will probably find that this book is refreshingly different and that it helps to facilitate learning through the emphasis on demystification.

In this first chapter on opening the doorway to strategy we now look at:

• W hat will the book do for you?
• W hat is entailed in reading it?
• W hat is strategy and why is this important?
• H ow do we discover the strategy guru hidden inside us?
• L ooking forward to the world of strategy.
• L essons so far.

This book will help you in eight key ways:

• G ive you a refreshingly simple understanding of the key ideas and concepts in strategy.
• Help you learn the language of strategy without getting lost in it and show you how it can often be translated into everyday words that will lose people or leave them cold.
• H elp you to become a strategic thinker, and make you more deeply thoughtful, too.
• E xplain to you the value of these ideas and highlight any drawbacks or limitations.
• I llustrate this with practical examples.
• G ive you concrete help in managing the strategy process.
• G ive you self-help exercises to apply the ideas to things you have direct experience of.
• G ive you probably the most complete system of strategic thinking that currently exists.

We will now expand on these individual points.

Keeping strategy simple

First of all, there is no reason why strategy shouldnt be kept as simple as possible; indeed, our very mission to demystify it is based on the premise that it doesnt have to be, and shouldnt be, so esoteric.

As an illustration of this, I was once teaching strategy at a major business school as part of a bigger team and I introduced a relatively simple tool called the strategic option grid (a technique that we will learn and grow to love, for appraising strategic options) to around 160 MBA students. The senior strategy professor under whom I had been working came up to me the next day and, waving the grid in an accusing fashion, said to me, Who has been introducing this grid to the students?, clearly horrified for some reason. Apparently he was very concerned because this technique appeared to reduce strategy making it into just five key variables. As he was a purist, he was objecting that in his view that is far too simplistic and we dont want to be making it too easy for students.

I felt somewhat bruised by this encounter, but hundreds of senior executives outside the business school had found this simplistic tool incredibly useful and it had been rolled out, for example, by the retailer Tesco and many others. I had felt that the students would really benefit from something that gave them a far more helicopter overview of the issues.

A few days later, an MBA student came up to me, waving the same piece of paper and saying, Who introduced this grid? By this time I was rather sensitive about the whole thing and slightly meekly admitted that it was me. He then went on to shock and surprise me by saying that it was brilliant and that this is the first time that I have actually understood how to evaluate a strategy.

While no one would suggest that, given todays business complexity, strategy can be easily boiled down to just a few ideas, I do think and I feel that this view is shared by CEOs and senior executives that it need not be made any more complex than it really is. The moral of this story is that there is great virtue in simplicity, particularly as the technique in question facilitated cognitive understanding of strategy without obviously oversimplifying it. The strategic option grid, although it boils decision making down into just five key criteria, raises a lot of further questions and is anything but over-simplistic. We will be seeing a lot of this grid.