got to lose…other than your dreams?
Robert Posten
Chairman, Comanche Holdings, LLC
and former co-president, TNS Landis
January 2014
The Pledge
Put your hand over your heart and repeat after me:
“I will never do something stupid.”
Go ahead, trust me.
“I will never do something stupid because of something written on a sheet of paper.”
This book, and the strategic plans you develop based on its concepts, are tools to enhance focus and communications. They are not a license to do stupid things.
This is a pledge that I have every member of every planning team take when we are working to define their strategy. Strategy is the collective set of answers to the questions about what we want the future to look like, why, and how to make it happen. Effective strategy requires specifics, such as these examples:
Executives are typically unwilling to volunteer specific numbers, based on concerns that doing so will contribute to their team making stupid decisions in the future, such as:
This pledge, and utilizing the processes of strategic planning that incorporate ongoing adjustment, frees you to develop, implement, and manage the right strategies for your company’s success.
Introduction
In Search of the Philosopher’s Stone
“Where you are headed is more important than how fast you are going. Rather than always focusing on what’s urgent, learn to focus on what is really important.”
Anonymous
“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”
James Joyce
My introduction to strategy and expectancy management
At the first executive strategy session I ever participated in, way back in 1976, I experienced an epiphany. As a passionate, intelligent engineering executive, albeit an inexperienced and newly minted one, I had been searching for the magic formula for business success. I pored over every business book, seeking the equivalent of the philosopher’s stone that would covert the company’s leaden daily issues into precious gold. During that fateful planning meeting, I realized the stark differences between a company’s yearly operating plan and a true strategic plan. My eyes lit up at the concept of “expectancy management,” the practice of making decisions today based on where we wanted to be in the future.
Finally, my company had a better approach than mixing random strategic elements in the hope they would produce some sort of positive chemical reaction. (Random actions in the past had included hiring a PhD to do R&D without any staff or support, investing days in the hopeless pursuit of a multimillion-dollar government contract, and trying to sell excess capacity as a commodity.) Instead, now the company could visualize a desired future and combine the elements “scientifically” to create it.
A paradigm shift
Here was the answer – it wasn’t one single, magical thing, it was a whole different paradigm. Before the meeting, my company had a corporate strategy best described as “just work harder.” We had gone deeply into debt with a New England bank to double our capacity, not noticing the onset of a recession that had temporarily flattened our growth. In fact, it was pressure from the bank, worried at our worsening financials, that had pushed us into “wasting” our time planning strategy rather than fighting fires.
A short three years after that first executive strategy meeting, the company was able to execute a highly successful initial public offering, showcasing a string of profitable years unprecedented in our corporate history.
The chemistry of strategy
With my engineer’s perspective, I clearly saw there was an underlying chemistry that could be used to dramatically transform today’s tarnished status quo into a precious, shiny future. I visualized myself facilitating successful strategic planning meetings when I retired from direct management. I embarked on a personal 37-year quest to understand what the chemistry of strategy was and to develop faster, cheaper, and better processes precisely attuned to needs of the hundreds of thousands of “not-yet-Fortune 500” companies.
The process we followed back in 1976 required weeks of effort to create a strategic plan. That process was a powerful tool for answering the what and why questions, but consumed so much of the company’s available planning capacity that there wasn’t sufficient time left for implementation – i.e., the how. The implementation processes we were following were designed for organizations with the resources of a Fortune 500 company, a club my employer was not a member of at the time.
Over 10,000 hours of hands-on facilitation with companies in every sector of the economy led me to bulletproof processes for creating, implementing, and sustaining a winning strategy that turns vision into reality. The result is the book you’re reading right now.
The Chemistry of Strategy documents solutions to the most common strategic and tactical issues you’re likely to face as you grow your company. Both the importance of the issues and the effectiveness of the solutions have been field-proven. Every smaller business will face these issues as it grows. You will benefit from my experience with companies in a broad range of industries, including energy, finance, food service, government, insurance, legal, logistics, manufacturing, market research, medical, technology, and what I like to call the “intentional nonprofits.” This diversity of client companies and the creative approaches they’ve deployed provides opportunities for cross fertilization. For example, medical practices can benefit from the quality systems that manufacturing firms routinely deploy. Manufacturing firms can benefit from the risk management insights of financial planning firms.
