is enhanced when you:
• Let go of rigid distinctions of what is right and wrong
• Eliminate expectations of what will happen
• Fill yourself with curiosity to understand more deeply
• Open yourself to new possibilities
• Ask simple questions
• Are open to possibilities
To learn to think strategically is not an exercise in rote memorization. It’s not stuffing your memory with a stack of facts about strategic frameworks and best practices. Instead, you cultivate an enthusiasm for the undiscovered and novel. You’re optimistic that someone can find a better way of doing things, and you know that step jumps can be better than incremental improvement. Start by emptying your mind of preconceptions and recognize the presence of ambiguity.
This chapter has introduced you to several important ideas about the nature, purpose, and scope of strategic thinking. It started with the underappreciated presence of ambiguity and concluded with a call for Shoshin. Along the way, I defined several essential concepts relating to competent strategic thinking.
In the next chapter, I more closely examine ambiguity as it affects strategy, goals, and plans. I take Chapter 1’s explanation of strategy as the inter-relationship of ends, ways, and means and use that to explain cleverness and to distinguish goals and plans from strategy. Finally, I examine the crafting of strategy and review a written statement of Oakland’s Moneyball strategy.
* There are many schools of thought on strategy. This definition of strategy is consistent throughout the book and coherently supports a model of strategic thinking as an individual competency.
† The movie captures the essential narrative of the use of Moneyball as a strategy, although it does deviate from the book in many important ways. My paraphrasing combines the events from the movie and the book.
‡ SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
§ We use the word trope in the sense of a common and over-used theme or tool of rhetoric.
CHAPTER 2
Cleverness
Strategy is a Crafted Approach of Fitting Resources to the Nuances of a Situation
Hope is not a strategy.
— Vince Lombardi
IT’s NATURAL TO SAY, “This is a clever child,” and less natural to say, “This is a clever adult.” The word clever implies that a person is creatively leveraging her resources to gain an advantage over a rival. With that characterization in mind, consider these three statements:
• The Oakland A’s had a clever strategy.
• The Oakland A’s had a clever goal.
• The Oakland A’s had a clever plan.
To what extent does each statement make sense to you? For me, the first statement is perfectly sensible because Oakland’s players were undervalued by others, yet they were configured in a way that led to sustained high performance. On paper, Oakland’s team was unexceptional. But despite their apparent weakness, they generated a superior record of competitive performance.
The second statement associating cleverness with goals seems odd, maybe nonsensical. This reveals a profound obstacle to good strategy and competent strategic thinking, which is people’s tendency to confuse goals and strategy.
A strategy can be good and clever, or bad and stupid.
The third statement is subject to the ambiguity of the word plan, which people often use to mean a coordinated approach to the challenge. The strategic-thinking narrative of Billy Beane reveals that he was curious about the potential of sabermetrics, skeptical of the intuitions and habits of baseball scouts, and willing to experiment to discover better methods of acquiring and using resources. Considering those elements, it’s appropriate to declare that Oakland had a deliberately conceived, clever plan.
People sometimes use the word plan in the literal sense of a document. Many strategic plans are wish lists of the organization’s goals and objectives. The authors often add graphics of favorable trends and pictures of smiling people and soaring eagles to create an illusion of achievement. Too often, they neglect the essential issues and choices for the organization.
Cleverness as the Integration of Ways, Means, and Ends
In Chapter 1, I shared the U.S. Army’s definition of strategy as a relationship between ways, means, and ends. It’s an excellent framework for helping people find a useful amount of rigor about what strategy is and how it works. The word relationship is the most important concept, because it is the relationship between ways, means, and ends that gives strategy its power.
A strategy has a less-powerful punch when it’s disintegrated. Many managers overlook the word relationship and focus on one of the elements. For examples of disintegration, some will tell you that strategy is a statement of vision (they’re focusing on the ends statement). Others will tell you that strategy consists of the steps toward the goal (they’re focusing on the ways statement). Yet others regard strategy as a matter of budgeting resources during an annual planning cycle (they’re focusing on the means).
Here are two examples of the incomplete view:
• Top executives. The typical pattern for top executives is to exchange the word strategy for goals, such as, “Our strategy is to internationalize,” or “Our strategy is to cut costs,” or “Our strategy is to be the industry leader.” Statements like these focus on the ends of strategy and ignore the ways and means.
Many people like to include visioning and vision statements in their strategy work. Many subscribe to the value of a “visionary leader” who describes a future state. These are simple and attractive ideas because the vision can establish a direction and motivate people to apply extra effort.
For contrast, former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner declares that, “in and of themselves, [vision statements] are useless in terms of pointing out how the institution is going to turn an aspirational goal into a reality.” He even goes so far as to criticize vision statements as “truly dangerous” because they create a comfort and confidence that’s not backed up by a commitment of resources and a logic for making progress. (Gerstner has the experience of being a CEO of several organizations. We examine his time at IBM in Chapters 9 and 10.)
I emphasized the word how in the preceding paragraph to stress that a strategy is hollow if it doesn’t identify the resources, commit those resources, and provide guidance for configuring those resources to pursue that strategy. Resources are finite. Managers must make difficult decisions
