O O Ø O O O O
Strategic Tinkling
So you’re paid $250+ grand a year for what, exactly?
I’ve been doing nothing but planning for the last month, and I’m more than a little of sick of it. My boss went on vacation at exactly the right time, so I got thrown into a working group responsible for articulating what product development projects we were going to undertake next year. For those who’ve never been involved in product development, this means identifying what new features you’re going to add as well as what new products or services you’ll create and launch to line your company’s pockets while meeting customer demand.
“Make money.” What a great plan. Your MBA does make you smarter than me.
Ideally, this process starts with the corporate goals—as they relate to our division—for the next five years or so, with a high-level overview of what we should focus on while meeting those goals. Unfortunately, all we got was “We need to grow our revenue by x percent.” Nothing more than that—no direction, no focus, nothing to state what areas to concentrate in, just “Make money.” What a great plan. Your MBA does make you smarter than me. I think I’ll take those words of wisdom and go into business for myself. It just might work. Bah.
Instead of providing us with high-level goals, our executive asked us to provide a strategic plan which would, well, umm... we’re not quite sure. They just said “Define your strategic plan.” I made the mistake of asking what the over-arching strategy for the company was in our market, and was told we were supposed to be defining that. Wow—bottom up strategy-setting—so this is what our executives get paid the big bucks for. Not only is this stupid, it’s dangerous. Can you imagine asking a buck private who hasn’t even been shot at where to place carrier groups, tank divisions, and infantry to win the war? That’s close to the same thing our executive was asking of us.
My solution would be to sell porn and become the largest spammers on earth. They’re proven money-makers, so why not? I am guessing that’s not what my executives are looking for, but I could be wrong. There’s something about those industries that may reflect poorly on our company as a whole, but I wasn’t sure because they didn’t tell me. For every idea I had, I had to wonder if this is what they were looking for, and so did everyone else, including our General Manager.
My solution would be to sell porn and become the largest spammers on earth.
The end result of this month-long planning exercise was directives that changed daily, and a hundred-page Powerpoint presentation (I shit you not) that provided in excruciating detail what each individual product group thought they were going to do next year. It had nothing to do with strategy (mine did, but no one understood it, and I had to change it because everyone looked at me funny when I handed in a four page brief), and everything to do with tactics.
What a colossal waste of time, because all of this had already been articulated.
For all you executives and wanna-be executives, I would like you to take five minutes now and read the definitions for strategic and tactical. They’re two very different things, yet higher-ups seem to confuse them all the time. It’s not surprising really, they’re just following a trend we’ve been seeing for years, and are working towards functional illiteracy while reaping in gobs of cash. If it’s strategic, it’ll be your job. If it’s tactical, then it’s the worker bees. To save yourself a little time, read on.
Strategic plans are a means to an end which is already defined. It goes something like this:
- Head mucky-muck decrees that the company will hold eighty percent market share for a certain category of product or service in a given market.
- Senior mucky-mucks agree, and bandy around high-level ideas on how they will gain that market share. The end result is something along the lines of “We will hold eighty percent of the market share for Product X by having the competitive features, competitive cost, and the best darn customer support around.” This story is passed on to the next-lower of mucky-mucks, usually the VPs.
- VPs look at numbers handed down, turn pale, and ask senior mucky-mucks if they’ve lost their collective minds. When they are told they have shareholders to answer to, the VPs adopt the statement as a strategy, and work with their people to devise ways they can meet the goals of that strategy.
The levels can be adjusted to fit the size of the company. The important part here is that there is a goal, and a very high-level idea of how that goal can be met. This is a strategy, and is simply stated and understood by all. With this strategy the worker bees who know the nitty gritty details of their corner of the hive can come up with ideas that help meet the end goal. This leads nicely into tactical planning.
The Marketing person thanks customer support, and drafts a recommendation to fire everyone there and outsource the help desk to India at one-tenth the cost.
Tactical planning is executed in the weeds. It involves all the people who know all the shit about one particular piece of the puzzle, and figuring out what needs to be done with their shit to meet the strategy already defined. The mucky-mucks generally don’t care about this, and show their disdain by reading mail on their Blackberry while listening to the tactical plan.
NB: It is very important that the strategy be articulated to the people in the weeds. If they are unaware that a strategy exists, they will be doing the equivalent of shooting at a two-inch target at 1500m off in the dark or, worse, trying to read the mucky-mucks’ minds. Tactical planning breaks the strategy down, and creates a response which aligns with the strategy to support it. It goes something like:
- The VP sees that the company wishes to improve the customer’s experience with technical support. Being the genius they are, they ask someone in Marketing what needs to be done.
- The person in Marketing has no fucking clue, but doesn’t want to look bad in front of the boss. They request a little time to think about it, which is granted.
- The Marketing person phones everyone they know in customer support for Product X and asks why the customers are leaving in droves.
- Customer support gives a list of stupid processes and procedures, gaps in the product feature set, the lack of information available to their team and the customers, and the complete lack of training they received on supporting Product X.
- The Marketing person thanks customer support, and drafts a recommendation to fire everyone there and outsource the help desk to India at one-tenth the cost.
- The VP takes this recommendation, puts their name on it, and puts it in the plan as “Something that must be done to ensure the goals in the strategy are met.”
It’s a tangible item which helps meet the Strategy. Simple, no? Can you see why a strategy would be set by the decision-makers in the company who have insight into the corporation as a whole, and talk to the other decision makers to formulate a plan? This plan would then be passed on to the folks who “make it so,” and they would create a tactical plan to ensure their new offerings align with the goals of the strategic plan. Got it? Then why in the hell do you ask me and my peers to set the strategy for our business, knowing full well we only deal with individual product portfolios, with the end result being forty different strategies that don’t mesh at all?
I’m a C-level manager, which means I have some decision-making ability provided I run it by ten or twenty people above me and they say it’s okay. I could tell you what I’d do in your shoes, and it would be mostly right because I actually understand the market you’re trying to break open and can even make money in it—my track record even supports my claim. Unfortunately, you’ve made it very clear that because that “C” is beside my name that my opinions don’t count, unless you can take a good idea and transmogrify it into your own to climb another rung. I’m not bitter, that’s business. Because it’s business and that’s the role you’ve defined for you and me, how’s about stepping up to the plate and knocking some decisions out instead of managing from the cheap seats and hoping for a home run?
Tell me what you want, and I’ll give you what you need, from my little corner of the empire, anyway.
Tuesday, Sep 9, 2003
PD DCXVI