Sticking with strategies that assure success
GREAT news! There’s less to making a business competitive than you might think. We know what works — what brings results. And since most firms don’t do what works, do only some of it, or do it badly, the way is open for you to gain the advantage you want more easily than you might think.
Understanding the world around you is more important than ever — and more difficult. Constant change is normal. Growing complexity entangles every decision, and a bewildering array of factors and actors tilt outcomes one way or another. Circumstances, timing and luck matter enormously. But when it comes to what managers can and must do to gain and sustain an edge, everything hinges on just eight critical strategy practices. undoubtedly the most prevalent and pernicious destroyer of value — what I call “the tyranny of tools”.
Over the past century or so, the management-advice industry — whose purpose, you’d think, is to help managers improve their performance — has churned out more theories, methods, models, frameworks, checklists, and questionnaires than any executive can ever use. And they keep coming. Yet efforts to push forward the boundaries of management thought and practice have been largely futile.
Some of the tools are clearly valuable. Most, however, add nothing to what you need, and if truth be told, are worth more to the experts who produce them than to the firms that fall for them.
But there’s so much hype that it’s hard to know which to go for and which to ignore.
And it’s also a fair bet that like most managers, you will try too many and inadvertently throw sand in the gears of your business.
Organisations are complex systems, and never in a “perfect” state. They’re always in tension between stability and chaos, repetition and renewal.
It’s easier to screw them up than make them hum, and managers are at the mercy of many factors they cannot control.
Learning how to apply any new tools, how they fit and interact, and how they’ll pan out always takes longer than anyone imagines, and every intervention has unanticipated consequences, good or bad.