October brings cool nights with the smell of campfires in the air, and a host of creatures lurking in the shadows of Halloween. Zombies have grown in number and popularity in recent years, giving the undead a place in the supernatural landscape. Zombies in business have no strategy. Non-strategists are those who fail to rise from the tactical grave and contribute to the business at a higher strategic level. You wouldn’t tolerate a zombie trying to eat Mark from the finance department during a staff meeting, but being non-strategic may lead to similar, albeit less deadly, results for your team. How many people on your team are guilty of these seven sins of lack of strategy?
- Kill the meeting.Due to severely reduced brain activity, the undead continue to utter gibberish. Non-strategic people can stifle strategy meetings by sending the conversation down rabbit holes, thereby hindering progress and creating widespread frustration among other members of the organization. Research shows that senior executives spend an average of 23 hours a week in meetings, and a staggering 83% say these meetings are an inefficient use of time. Why? This is usually due to a lack of strategy from one or two members of the team, causing the team to stray off topic until people lose interest and become numb to what a huge waste of time it is.
As a facilitator who has led hundreds of strategy meetings, I recommend a variety of approaches to solving this problem. An effective preventive measure is to educate your team on the difference between strategy and tactics and provide examples. This helps people better understand which topics are strategic and which are tactical, allowing them to contribute appropriately. Another technique is to create “tactical parking lots.” Tactical Parking Lot borrows the concept of the parking lot flipchart, allowing the facilitator to quickly transfer any rabbit hole tactical comments to the flipchart, restoring the group’s strategic-level conversation.
- Wandering aimlessly. Drawn to the loud noises and bright lights, the undead wander aimlessly across the land. Unstrategic people lack direction, which leads them to seize every new shining opportunity that comes their way. Fundamentally, they lack priorities and the proper filters to focus their attention. A study of 250,000 senior executives found that 86% believe setting strategic direction is the most important role of a leader and the number one factor in improving organizational health.
In my experience conducting strategy meetings with executive leadership teams to develop strategic direction, I have found it important to address two obvious but often glossed-over questions: 1) What do you want to achieve? 2) How will you implement it? Take a look at your latest plans. Are these two questions immediately answered in the first or second slide? If not, the answer is likely hidden in an Excel spreadsheet or a colorful chart that the team doesn’t know or recognize. Research shows that when teams believe their leaders have the ability to set good strategic direction, they are 40% more determined to successfully execute the strategy.
- Do everything. The undead lack the discipline to choose just one victim – they try to eat them all. People without strategies lack the discipline to say no. They strive to provide all services to all customers, whether internal or external. When Mary Barra took over as CEO of General Motors, she compared her new approach to that of her previous leader, saying: “We’re here to win. We can’t do that by serving everyone everywhere. Offering everything to win is not the right strategy.
The dirty secret of strategy is that you have to say no to people both internally and externally. Managers need to be deliberately unresponsive to certain customer needs so that they can be highly responsive to other needs, thereby delivering the greatest substantial value. The necessary role of trade-offs in strategy is to intentionally dissatisfy some customers by focusing resources on areas destined to provide the greatest value to the customers most willing to pay for it. If you can’t prioritize what’s important, then nothing will matter.
- Infect others. The undead are contagious. Anyone bitten by a zombie will turn into a zombie. People without a strategy infect their colleagues with irrelevant emails, tasks, and fire drills, slowly draining their morale. In a webinar I moderated with 200 CEOs, these senior leaders identified the top strategic challenge facing their organizations as being “reactive and tactical.” When there’s no need to fan the flames of tactical hell, all it takes is one person ringing the fire drill bell, adding to an email chain, or calling a meeting.
One way to help people move from tactics to strategy is through education. Hosting a workshop on what strategy means, followed by weekly microlearning via email in the form of short videos, podcasts, and infographics, can be an effective way to build strategy skills over time. Another effective way to move people from being reactive and tactical to thoughtful and strategic is to focus their attention on insights. The simple definition of insight is “learning that brings new value.” Get leaders at all levels to start holding employees accountable for generating and collecting three to five new insights each quarter. Then collect these insights and distribute them through the internal insights network, and watch your team move to a higher strategic level.
- state of decay. The undead are in a state of decay, usually rotting away and losing body parts. The strategies of non-strategic firms will decline over time as competition converges or becomes obsolete. In both cases, the differentiated value they once brought to the market is no longer there, and their businesses are teetering on the edge of commoditization and customer irrelevance. A survey of 500 senior executives found that nine out of 10 believe their teams are missing out on significant opportunities in the market.
One issue per quarter Strategy adjustment It is an effective technique to prevent business decline. In the strategic alignment sessions I design for management teams, some key strategic thinking exercises are conducted to assess market trends and patterns, how customer thinking and actions are evolving, changes in the competitive landscape, and ways to overcome challenges within the company. It is also an excellent forum for sharing strategic insights across functions and tracking current strategic initiatives.
- Lack of innovation.The undead don’t try anything new – they just want to eat brains. People without strategy are tied to the status quo and cannot contribute to innovation. A study of new product launches found that 86% of new products were simply line extensions without significant improvements or benefits to customers. Interestingly, 14% of product launches did deliver significant new value advancements for customers, generating the majority of profits (61%).
Innovation can be a difficult topic for managers, who often expect they will have to spend millions of dollars to create a new product or technology. When I lead an innovative thinking workshop with a team of senior executives, we explore a useful definition of innovation: “creating new value for customers.” When innovation efforts are viewed through this lens, it becomes clear that every function in an organization can work to identify new areas of value for the customers they serve (internal or external).
- Lack of purpose. Technically, the undead are dead, with no heartbeat or other signs of life. People without a strategy lack the ability to work with purpose, which is the core of a business. Purpose takes the form of mission (current purpose), vision (future purpose), and values (guiding purpose). When these are created with precision and relevance, they can act as a filter for opportunity and guardrails for strategy.
Purpose is also the basis for organizations to provide differentiated value to customers, laying the foundation for competitive advantage. A 40-year study of 25,000 companies found that companies that compete on differentiation rather than price are the most successful. Does your team use goals to drive their work, and does the goal form the basis of your strategy?
This Halloween, walk through the creaky wooden doors of a haunted house and you might encounter evil clowns, chainsaw-wielding maniacs and demons. Enter a conference room down the hall and you’re likely to encounter the same scary thing: an unstrategic person making a tactical comment that sends the entire meeting into business purgatory. While their brains may not yet be reaching their strategic potential, you can take comfort in the fact that at least they’re not trying to eat your brain.
