9 ms·

Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Strategies (2017)

290 points by anthilemoon 7y ago

lordnacho 7y ago
There's a lot of fluff in this article but the main things for me are that strategy includes deciding what not to do, and that it's easy to mistake goals for strategies. Maybe the best place to see this is sports. How often have you been playing a match, and at some point the coach says "we need to score a goal"? As if that's not obvious. What he needs to say is "keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass".
- TheMightyLlama 7y ago
  The problem with "Keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass" is still a tactic. Having recently started attempting to understand what a strategy really is, I've understood the following. A strategy is tripartite. The Strategy, it's Guiding Principles and Actions (tactics) A strategy takes into account the environment within which one is working and to view it as a dynamic thing. In your football example we might be able to say that the dynamic part of the game is how the opposition arranges their players and who is in which position. Knowing this we can define some Guiding Principles for the individual game. One might choose a loaded and strong defence as your team's offence is not as strong as the oppositions defence. The guiding principle is "Defend our ground" Actions (tactics) would be "Keep the few strikers far forward and protect the defenders" Caveat: I'm not a footballer, and I wish I had written this to end up with the original tactic mentioned "Keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass"
  - kyllo 7y ago
    Perhaps another problem with strategy is that we expect too much from it, because we neglect and devalue tactics. I often hear "strategic thinking" lauded and "tactical thinking" looked down upon by managerial types. But a strategy alone achieves nothing--you need good tactics to execute on it.
    - MiracleUser 7y ago
      background: i make my living putting together quantitative analysis to support / reject strategic decisions I would not say a strategy alone achieves nothing - its actually quite the opposite the larger your "team" and scope of activity is. A lot of business decisions are not related to having a tactic but are a trade off between two important things (like cost and quality). Having a clear strategy allows people in your company to arrive at the same decision for which side of that trade-off to favor - which increases individual autonomy. For example, a high volume strategy leads to favoring low cost. A strategy to be scalable might favor higher upfront costs since cheap non-scalable options are removed from review. In both cases, when an option doesnt fit the strategy it is not considered an option. So your decision pool is reduced. Sometimes this reduction is enough that the choice is made for you. Especially when accounting for multiple strategies and company initiatives. Tactics are a different beast. Sometimes a tactic involves going against the general strategy, but is approved because there is confident calculation behind it and the expected result is wanted. The most important thing here is the calculation. It takes time and energy to develop and communicate a tactic. Those things are limited, so you can only be working on so many tactics at once, and only so many people are qualified to be doing that work (because those job titles are expensive). The critical factor here is that the volume of decisions that need to be made across an organization on a day-to-day basis are not bound by how much time you have to develop a tactic for each of them. So you have to trust the autonomy of your company hierarchy at each level to be able to make default decisions that dont interfere with company strategy. A strategy alone is enough to help keep a loose handle on things.. it goes a long way to preventing chaos. You might end up with a cashier accepting a return on something that is obviously not a valid return, but the overall strategy of being return-friendly is maintained. You also dont end up with a fist-fight between your cashier and the customer (extreme alternative example). When you have time, you develop a tactic for validating returns with order#'s or receipts, etc. but maybe your tactic team is busy dealing with warehouse optimizations this month
      - kyllo 7y ago
        Yes, flexibly applying situational tactics to follow the principle and spirit of the strategy rather than the letter of the rulebook, is what leaders generally want their people to do. They communicate intent and let good judgement do the rest. The way I have always thought of strategy, though, is that it should be directional. Say what input variables you think we should increase or decrease, in order to get closer to the optimum, relative to where we are currently. Taking your example of cost vs. quality. Obviously we want to find an optimum. If a manager can state which direction we need to move in and why, to make progress toward the optimum, I will take their strategy seriously. But if they just tell their people to "optimize," I dismiss them as having no strategy. A manager who's responsible for formulating and communicating a strategy, has to at least have an opinion about which side of the curve we're currently on. Early in my career I was an analyst at an ocean shipping company--lower rates meant fuller ships, higher rates meant better unit margin but lower utilization. Corporate's strategic message? "Fill up the ships with high-paying cargo." It became a joke among the employees.
  - lordnacho 7y ago
    In all my reading I've never found a satisfactory distinction between strategy and tactics. Every attempt I've seen either doesn't provide a clear answer or falls on some simple contradiction. My current thinking is that people tend to think of strategy as higher level than tactics, but that there's never a clear line that tells you which you are looking at. It's more the importance you want to give some decision that determines what you call it.
    - ScalaFan 7y ago
      Here is an example within the world of chess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#Strategy_and_tactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#Strategy_and_tactics They are very well understood and delineated within that context.
      - lordnacho 7y ago
        > These two aspects of the gameplay cannot be completely separated, because strategic goals are mostly achieved through tactics, while the tactical opportunities are based on the previous strategy of play.
        ScalaFan 7y ago
        And yet when you ask a chess player whether the situation has a tactic or a strategy in it (in some cases both), they can tell you which choice is a tactic and which is a strategy. Tactics are so well recognized that you can practice them: https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated
Dwolb 7y ago
“Strategy is choosing what not to do” is the standard trope. Start-ups sorta get this already: focus on a core base of customers who love your product despite its flaws. Iterate. The insight I liked best in this article was, “In contrast, top executives should resist the temptation to decide what projects live and die within their firms. Strategy implementation requires top managers to design the company’s internal system that does the selection for them.” So much your job as an exec is to design the system that gives others enough context and autonomy to flourish. And hopefully over time that system continues to improve itself.
- hef19898 7y ago
  Second this. If execs don't build a system that enables people employees are simple tools. Sure, execs like the superficial control that comes with it. Yet, it doesn't serve customers, employees nor the company and its execs.
- luckydata 7y ago
  that's not strategy though, that's a process to inform a strategy.
  - chiefalchemist 7y ago
    I don't disagree with you per se. But perhaps it's a strategy that yields a process, which aims to yield more strategy? Part recursive. Part dog-fooding.
moksly 7y ago
We have a scientist in Denmark called Morten Münster who wrote a book called “Jytte fra marketing er desværre gået for i dag” (Karen from marketing has unfortunately left for the day), in which he talks a lot about the necessity of clear and simple strategies that can be understood by employees at 3pm on a busy Thursday. He has a lot of good examples, but mostly he outlines how silly something a long the lines of “forward together” is as a strategy because it quite literally means nothing to anyone who does any real work. It agrees with this article, and I always find it kind of hilarious. I do work on the public sector, and we’re exceptionally bad at implementing strategies, despite having hundreds of people working on it. The thing is though, that most of those people have read these articles and books, exactly like this one. So apparently knowing these things aren’t even helping us implement meaningful strategies. After years in the bureaucracy I’ve long learned to simply keep quiet while these pseudo-workers do their thing, and then get things done when they leave. Then you can always word the work up to sound like it plays into whatever current strategy we’re pursuing at the end of the year review.
- azepoi 7y ago
  I looked it up, it appears the title has been translated into English. Morten Münster, I'm Afraid Debbie From Marketing Has Left for the Day - How to Use Behavioural Design to Create Change in the Real World, Translated from Danish by Helen Dyrbye, Gyldendal Business, 2019
  - goto11 7y ago
    Pretty funny how you translate names like "Jytte". The translator chose "Debbie" while moksly chose "Karen"
    - LargeWu 7y ago
      Probably just substituted a generic American sounding name, rather than a translation.
    - twic 7y ago
      While the name is actually cognate with Judith.
simonh 7y ago
“Focusing is about saying ‘no,‘” Jobs explained at Apple’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). “You’ve got to say ‘no, no, no’ and when you say ‘no,’ you piss people off.”
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
A strategic plan must also have decision points and alternatives laid out. Not just a direction. Not just the logic behind. What to do when X happens; how far to reach when goals are not being met; how much to spend.
chrisweekly 7y ago
As a mostly-solo entrepreneur / consultant, I've had some success in shifting professional engagements toward the "strategic consulting" end of the spectrum. I credit author R. Rumelt ("Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"), and FB VP Product J. Zhao ("How to be Strategic") for excellent perspective and actionable advice, which distills down to: A strategy is a set of actions designed to achieve a particular objective. The actions need to be credible, coherent, and focused. Designing them properly takes hard work. The most practical path to actually being strategic: 1. "Wild Success": Create alignment around what it looks like 2. "Problems / Whose": Deeply grok problem space and its ecosys, and be crystal clear abt what problems looking to solve, and for whom. 3. Prioritize: Focus means saying "no". Cut, ruthlessly, anything inessential. Working on applying these ideas outside work context, too.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  > A strategy is a set of actions designed to achieve a particular objective. Yes. I have seen people at my work make that same error that you describe. It took the form of a bullet point in a presentation, "our strategy is to migrate to the Foo platform, for these (valid) reasons". And I couldn't help thinking: That is a good goal, but it won't happen unless you make it happen. You don't have a strategy for that goal until you allocate time to it, set milestones, get buy-in from below, get management to tell people to it, decide which teams will go first, etc. Without that, all you have is a vague aspiration. Not a strategy. Getting to the details of the strategy means committing to doing something even though there is effort involved, and since available effort is short supply, that means you have to choose.
  - chrisweekly 7y ago
    What "error"? That definition comes straight from Richard Rumelt who wrote one of the all-time most influential books on strategy. And of _course_ you have to actually take action and not merely talk about it! That goes without saying. If you read the rest of my comment, you'll see I mention the same things you do, in similar words! "it takes hard work", "create alignment", "prioritize... saying no" etc. Hard to tell if you're just trolling. Responded anyway just in case you simply rushed to make a point w/out noticing you'd entirely missed mine.
burlesona 7y ago
If you’re interested in this topic, the best book I’ve read is called Good Strategy Bad Strategy. It’s an excellent read. Here’s the main takeaway: A real strategy consists of the following parts, which the author calls the “kernel” of a strategy. If any of these are missing, you don’t have a strategy. 1) A diagnosis of the problem or opportunity. 2) A high level guiding policy / hypothesis for how to respond. 3) Coherent Actions that will be your first / primary steps to execute on the strategy. I’ve found that just getting that idea into my head has transformed the way I think about problems, and plan and communicate responses. I couldn’t recommend the book enough.
- texasbigdata 7y ago
  Also "Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works" by the old CEO of procter and gamble and the dean of the toronto business school. In addition to good strategy / bad strategy, playing to win is sort of heads and shoulder above anything else strategy related and on the level of the legendary grove and porter books. Strongly recommend as well.
  - nickpinkston 7y ago
    Fully agree - those are my two favorites too. I also like "Strategy in Action" for more concrete / less abstract thinkers more focused on execution. These people shouldn't be working on company strategy, but this step-by-step approach is a good fit for them I think. Also nice, they're all on Audible.
- dsjoerg 7y ago
  You beat me to it! Great book, it's right here on my bookshelf.
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  I feel like what you won't do is crucial. Without that, it feels like no decision was actually made.
  - burlesona 7y ago
abakker 7y ago
Strategy is choices we make to achieve a goal. Those choices represent implied utility through the reduction in optionality. Executing a strategy means making the trade offs between utility and opportunity cost, to arrive at a prioritization of choices, and then realizing those opportunity costs.
invalidOrTaken 7y ago
I used to read a lot about strategy, but it didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. The thing is, it's such a big topic, and so context-dependent, that so many "conversations about strategy" end up with the conversants either talking past each other, with Bob and Alice using the same words but meaning different things by them. This is how consultants get their reputations as purveyors of fluff---either the consultant is a space cadet and is talking about generalities without translation into the clients' reality, or the client is not understanding (or not listening to!) the consultant, who is later maligned as a purveyor of fluff. A lot of the problem stems from people thinking and talking at different layers of abstraction. We all suck at talking about strategy, but programmers are probably the best at understanding why we suck. For most people, most of the time, we're better off staying concrete.
brlewis 7y ago
“If there is one thing I have learned about communicating choices, it is that we always focus on what the choices are. I now realize you have to spend at least as much time on explaining the logic behind the choices.” This is a great thing to keep in mind for engineering architecture and policy.
cryptica 7y ago
All this stuff is so obvious, why does it even need to be written down? It's hard to believe that people don't know this intuitively. I guess there are so many highly paid bureaucrats who don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it that such basic articles have become a necessity.

290 points by anthilemoon 7y ago

There's a lot of fluff in this article but the main things for me are that strategy includes deciding what not to do, and that it's easy to mistake goals for strategies. Maybe the best place to see this is sports. How often have you been playing a match, and at some point the coach says "we need to score a goal"? As if that's not obvious. What he needs to say is "keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass".

TheMightyLlama 7y ago
The problem with "Keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass" is still a tactic. Having recently started attempting to understand what a strategy really is, I've understood the following. A strategy is tripartite. The Strategy, it's Guiding Principles and Actions (tactics) A strategy takes into account the environment within which one is working and to view it as a dynamic thing. In your football example we might be able to say that the dynamic part of the game is how the opposition arranges their players and who is in which position. Knowing this we can define some Guiding Principles for the individual game. One might choose a loaded and strong defence as your team's offence is not as strong as the oppositions defence. The guiding principle is "Defend our ground" Actions (tactics) would be "Keep the few strikers far forward and protect the defenders" Caveat: I'm not a footballer, and I wish I had written this to end up with the original tactic mentioned "Keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass"
- kyllo 7y ago
  Perhaps another problem with strategy is that we expect too much from it, because we neglect and devalue tactics. I often hear "strategic thinking" lauded and "tactical thinking" looked down upon by managerial types. But a strategy alone achieves nothing--you need good tactics to execute on it.
  - MiracleUser 7y ago
    background: i make my living putting together quantitative analysis to support / reject strategic decisions I would not say a strategy alone achieves nothing - its actually quite the opposite the larger your "team" and scope of activity is. A lot of business decisions are not related to having a tactic but are a trade off between two important things (like cost and quality). Having a clear strategy allows people in your company to arrive at the same decision for which side of that trade-off to favor - which increases individual autonomy. For example, a high volume strategy leads to favoring low cost. A strategy to be scalable might favor higher upfront costs since cheap non-scalable options are removed from review. In both cases, when an option doesnt fit the strategy it is not considered an option. So your decision pool is reduced. Sometimes this reduction is enough that the choice is made for you. Especially when accounting for multiple strategies and company initiatives. Tactics are a different beast. Sometimes a tactic involves going against the general strategy, but is approved because there is confident calculation behind it and the expected result is wanted. The most important thing here is the calculation. It takes time and energy to develop and communicate a tactic. Those things are limited, so you can only be working on so many tactics at once, and only so many people are qualified to be doing that work (because those job titles are expensive). The critical factor here is that the volume of decisions that need to be made across an organization on a day-to-day basis are not bound by how much time you have to develop a tactic for each of them. So you have to trust the autonomy of your company hierarchy at each level to be able to make default decisions that dont interfere with company strategy. A strategy alone is enough to help keep a loose handle on things.. it goes a long way to preventing chaos. You might end up with a cashier accepting a return on something that is obviously not a valid return, but the overall strategy of being return-friendly is maintained. You also dont end up with a fist-fight between your cashier and the customer (extreme alternative example). When you have time, you develop a tactic for validating returns with order#'s or receipts, etc. but maybe your tactic team is busy dealing with warehouse optimizations this month
    - kyllo 7y ago
      Yes, flexibly applying situational tactics to follow the principle and spirit of the strategy rather than the letter of the rulebook, is what leaders generally want their people to do. They communicate intent and let good judgement do the rest. The way I have always thought of strategy, though, is that it should be directional. Say what input variables you think we should increase or decrease, in order to get closer to the optimum, relative to where we are currently. Taking your example of cost vs. quality. Obviously we want to find an optimum. If a manager can state which direction we need to move in and why, to make progress toward the optimum, I will take their strategy seriously. But if they just tell their people to "optimize," I dismiss them as having no strategy. A manager who's responsible for formulating and communicating a strategy, has to at least have an opinion about which side of the curve we're currently on. Early in my career I was an analyst at an ocean shipping company--lower rates meant fuller ships, higher rates meant better unit margin but lower utilization. Corporate's strategic message? "Fill up the ships with high-paying cargo." It became a joke among the employees.
- lordnacho 7y ago
  In all my reading I've never found a satisfactory distinction between strategy and tactics. Every attempt I've seen either doesn't provide a clear answer or falls on some simple contradiction. My current thinking is that people tend to think of strategy as higher level than tactics, but that there's never a clear line that tells you which you are looking at. It's more the importance you want to give some decision that determines what you call it.
  - ScalaFan 7y ago
    Here is an example within the world of chess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#Strategy_and_tactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#Strategy_and_tactics They are very well understood and delineated within that context.
    - lordnacho 7y ago
      > These two aspects of the gameplay cannot be completely separated, because strategic goals are mostly achieved through tactics, while the tactical opportunities are based on the previous strategy of play.
      - ScalaFan 7y ago
        And yet when you ask a chess player whether the situation has a tactic or a strategy in it (in some cases both), they can tell you which choice is a tactic and which is a strategy. Tactics are so well recognized that you can practice them: https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated

Dwolb 7y ago

“Strategy is choosing what not to do” is the standard trope. Start-ups sorta get this already: focus on a core base of customers who love your product despite its flaws. Iterate. The insight I liked best in this article was, “In contrast, top executives should resist the temptation to decide what projects live and die within their firms. Strategy implementation requires top managers to design the company’s internal system that does the selection for them.” So much your job as an exec is to design the system that gives others enough context and autonomy to flourish. And hopefully over time that system continues to improve itself.

hef19898 7y ago
Second this. If execs don't build a system that enables people employees are simple tools. Sure, execs like the superficial control that comes with it. Yet, it doesn't serve customers, employees nor the company and its execs.
luckydata 7y ago
that's not strategy though, that's a process to inform a strategy.
- chiefalchemist 7y ago
  I don't disagree with you per se. But perhaps it's a strategy that yields a process, which aims to yield more strategy? Part recursive. Part dog-fooding.

moksly 7y ago

We have a scientist in Denmark called Morten Münster who wrote a book called “Jytte fra marketing er desværre gået for i dag” (Karen from marketing has unfortunately left for the day), in which he talks a lot about the necessity of clear and simple strategies that can be understood by employees at 3pm on a busy Thursday. He has a lot of good examples, but mostly he outlines how silly something a long the lines of “forward together” is as a strategy because it quite literally means nothing to anyone who does any real work. It agrees with this article, and I always find it kind of hilarious. I do work on the public sector, and we’re exceptionally bad at implementing strategies, despite having hundreds of people working on it. The thing is though, that most of those people have read these articles and books, exactly like this one. So apparently knowing these things aren’t even helping us implement meaningful strategies. After years in the bureaucracy I’ve long learned to simply keep quiet while these pseudo-workers do their thing, and then get things done when they leave. Then you can always word the work up to sound like it plays into whatever current strategy we’re pursuing at the end of the year review.

azepoi 7y ago
I looked it up, it appears the title has been translated into English. Morten Münster, I'm Afraid Debbie From Marketing Has Left for the Day - How to Use Behavioural Design to Create Change in the Real World, Translated from Danish by Helen Dyrbye, Gyldendal Business, 2019
- goto11 7y ago
  Pretty funny how you translate names like "Jytte". The translator chose "Debbie" while moksly chose "Karen"
  - LargeWu 7y ago
    Probably just substituted a generic American sounding name, rather than a translation.
  - twic 7y ago
    While the name is actually cognate with Judith.

simonh 7y ago

“Focusing is about saying ‘no,‘” Jobs explained at Apple’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). “You’ve got to say ‘no, no, no’ and when you say ‘no,’ you piss people off.”

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

A strategic plan must also have decision points and alternatives laid out. Not just a direction. Not just the logic behind. What to do when X happens; how far to reach when goals are not being met; how much to spend.

chrisweekly 7y ago

As a mostly-solo entrepreneur / consultant, I've had some success in shifting professional engagements toward the "strategic consulting" end of the spectrum. I credit author R. Rumelt ("Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"), and FB VP Product J. Zhao ("How to be Strategic") for excellent perspective and actionable advice, which distills down to: A strategy is a set of actions designed to achieve a particular objective. The actions need to be credible, coherent, and focused. Designing them properly takes hard work. The most practical path to actually being strategic: 1. "Wild Success": Create alignment around what it looks like 2. "Problems / Whose": Deeply grok problem space and its ecosys, and be crystal clear abt what problems looking to solve, and for whom. 3. Prioritize: Focus means saying "no". Cut, ruthlessly, anything inessential. Working on applying these ideas outside work context, too.

SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
> A strategy is a set of actions designed to achieve a particular objective. Yes. I have seen people at my work make that same error that you describe. It took the form of a bullet point in a presentation, "our strategy is to migrate to the Foo platform, for these (valid) reasons". And I couldn't help thinking: That is a good goal, but it won't happen unless you make it happen. You don't have a strategy for that goal until you allocate time to it, set milestones, get buy-in from below, get management to tell people to it, decide which teams will go first, etc. Without that, all you have is a vague aspiration. Not a strategy. Getting to the details of the strategy means committing to doing something even though there is effort involved, and since available effort is short supply, that means you have to choose.
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  What "error"? That definition comes straight from Richard Rumelt who wrote one of the all-time most influential books on strategy. And of _course_ you have to actually take action and not merely talk about it! That goes without saying. If you read the rest of my comment, you'll see I mention the same things you do, in similar words! "it takes hard work", "create alignment", "prioritize... saying no" etc. Hard to tell if you're just trolling. Responded anyway just in case you simply rushed to make a point w/out noticing you'd entirely missed mine.

burlesona 7y ago

If you’re interested in this topic, the best book I’ve read is called Good Strategy Bad Strategy. It’s an excellent read. Here’s the main takeaway: A real strategy consists of the following parts, which the author calls the “kernel” of a strategy. If any of these are missing, you don’t have a strategy. 1) A diagnosis of the problem or opportunity. 2) A high level guiding policy / hypothesis for how to respond. 3) Coherent Actions that will be your first / primary steps to execute on the strategy. I’ve found that just getting that idea into my head has transformed the way I think about problems, and plan and communicate responses. I couldn’t recommend the book enough.

texasbigdata 7y ago
Also "Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works" by the old CEO of procter and gamble and the dean of the toronto business school. In addition to good strategy / bad strategy, playing to win is sort of heads and shoulder above anything else strategy related and on the level of the legendary grove and porter books. Strongly recommend as well.
- nickpinkston 7y ago
  Fully agree - those are my two favorites too. I also like "Strategy in Action" for more concrete / less abstract thinkers more focused on execution. These people shouldn't be working on company strategy, but this step-by-step approach is a good fit for them I think. Also nice, they're all on Audible.
dsjoerg 7y ago
You beat me to it! Great book, it's right here on my bookshelf.
jeffdavis 7y ago
I feel like what you won't do is crucial. Without that, it feels like no decision was actually made.
- burlesona 7y ago

abakker 7y ago

Strategy is choices we make to achieve a goal. Those choices represent implied utility through the reduction in optionality. Executing a strategy means making the trade offs between utility and opportunity cost, to arrive at a prioritization of choices, and then realizing those opportunity costs.

invalidOrTaken 7y ago

I used to read a lot about strategy, but it didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. The thing is, it's such a big topic, and so context-dependent, that so many "conversations about strategy" end up with the conversants either talking past each other, with Bob and Alice using the same words but meaning different things by them. This is how consultants get their reputations as purveyors of fluff---either the consultant is a space cadet and is talking about generalities without translation into the clients' reality, or the client is not understanding (or not listening to!) the consultant, who is later maligned as a purveyor of fluff. A lot of the problem stems from people thinking and talking at different layers of abstraction. We all suck at talking about strategy, but programmers are probably the best at understanding why we suck. For most people, most of the time, we're better off staying concrete.

brlewis 7y ago

“If there is one thing I have learned about communicating choices, it is that we always focus on what the choices are. I now realize you have to spend at least as much time on explaining the logic behind the choices.” This is a great thing to keep in mind for engineering architecture and policy.

cryptica 7y ago

All this stuff is so obvious, why does it even need to be written down? It's hard to believe that people don't know this intuitively. I guess there are so many highly paid bureaucrats who don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it that such basic articles have become a necessity.