3 ms·

I agree. It’s crazy how many senior people don’t understand strategy and can’t deal with complexity. Ex, I once worked at a company that required creation of a

I agree. It’s crazy how many senior people don’t understand strategy and can’t deal with complexity. Ex, I once worked at a company that required creation of a two sided market (buyers and sellers). I proposed that we bootstrap the market by creating a variant of our product to enter an existing, complementary market. By offering a cheaper solution in the complementary market with clear benefits for users, its likely we would have been able to establish a user base that we could then use to stimulate the seller side of the market, thereby achieving our goal of creating a brand new market. The strategy our management consultant CEO went with was to put ads on LinkedIn. Nobody works there any more.

mattbuilds 5y ago
My theory is that people have been trained and rewarded for being “not wrong”. Strategy requires you to take a stance and get specific. Sometimes the strategy will not work. I think we need to do a better job of encouraging this sort of thinking. I don’t remember where I heard but it was something along the lines of “we tell kids they can be whatever they want and then actively discourage them when they take the necessary steps to do those things by operating outside the box”. So this type of thinking becomes normal. Then when it comes to strategize people try to follow “best practices” and “proven techniques” which is kind of the opposite of strategy.
- doctor_eval 5y ago
  Yes, I like this comment a lot. Any true strategy will need to have a specific outcome, and therefore can fail if the outcome is not reached. On the other hand, if you (or in my case the CEO) listen to any one of the thousand consultants who will tell you that, say, advertising on social media is a guaranteed path to sales, you can’t ever be wrong because you’ve implemented - as you say - “best practice” and “proven techniques”; you did your job but “for some reason” - externalities - it didn’t work. There was no strategy involved, but we don’t need to talk about that. This kind of thinking drives me nuts. Your theory also helps explain why people buy Exchange, or JIRA, or IBM in the olden days.
  - mattbuilds 5y ago
    People want all the rewards with none of the risk. But what’s funny is they are still taking the risk of failure. It’s more that they can fail and shift all blame away by saying “we did it all right, it just didn’t work”. It’s easier than doing the work themselves. I just think we would all be better off if we told people it’s OK to try and fail, as long as we learn from those failures. We need to support people trying new things. If we just follow prevailing wisdom, we can only tackle problems that are already solved.
    - gompertz 5y ago
      And I think these comments summarize why consultants like Accenture, KPMG, McKinsey, etc survive today. They are for leaders who want to shift strategy risk away from their own responsibility. Whether a strategy succeeds or fails; consultants have a finite lifespan with the organization
      - mattbuilds 5y ago
        Yea absolutely. So much of it is a shell game (in some companies) where you attempt to shift blame and take credit for successes. Those type of consultancies help facilitate the game.
        doctor_eval 5y ago
        Yeah as a (former) small business owner I’ve been thrown under the bus by consultants more times than I care to recall. You’re an easy target when you don’t have the political pull to point out the absurdity of what’s going on.
        mattbuilds 5y ago
        What’s always been surprising to me is that more people don’t recognize it. My background didn’t give me the education I’m wish I had either, in fact I got the opposite. But it didn’t take all that long in the real world to see it. Maybe people just accept what they see and roll with it.

mattbuilds 5y ago

My theory is that people have been trained and rewarded for being “not wrong”. Strategy requires you to take a stance and get specific. Sometimes the strategy will not work. I think we need to do a better job of encouraging this sort of thinking. I don’t remember where I heard but it was something along the lines of “we tell kids they can be whatever they want and then actively discourage them when they take the necessary steps to do those things by operating outside the box”. So this type of thinking becomes normal. Then when it comes to strategize people try to follow “best practices” and “proven techniques” which is kind of the opposite of strategy.

doctor_eval 5y ago
Yes, I like this comment a lot. Any true strategy will need to have a specific outcome, and therefore can fail if the outcome is not reached. On the other hand, if you (or in my case the CEO) listen to any one of the thousand consultants who will tell you that, say, advertising on social media is a guaranteed path to sales, you can’t ever be wrong because you’ve implemented - as you say - “best practice” and “proven techniques”; you did your job but “for some reason” - externalities - it didn’t work. There was no strategy involved, but we don’t need to talk about that. This kind of thinking drives me nuts. Your theory also helps explain why people buy Exchange, or JIRA, or IBM in the olden days.
- mattbuilds 5y ago
  People want all the rewards with none of the risk. But what’s funny is they are still taking the risk of failure. It’s more that they can fail and shift all blame away by saying “we did it all right, it just didn’t work”. It’s easier than doing the work themselves. I just think we would all be better off if we told people it’s OK to try and fail, as long as we learn from those failures. We need to support people trying new things. If we just follow prevailing wisdom, we can only tackle problems that are already solved.
  - gompertz 5y ago
    And I think these comments summarize why consultants like Accenture, KPMG, McKinsey, etc survive today. They are for leaders who want to shift strategy risk away from their own responsibility. Whether a strategy succeeds or fails; consultants have a finite lifespan with the organization
    - mattbuilds 5y ago
      Yea absolutely. So much of it is a shell game (in some companies) where you attempt to shift blame and take credit for successes. Those type of consultancies help facilitate the game.
      - doctor_eval 5y ago
        Yeah as a (former) small business owner I’ve been thrown under the bus by consultants more times than I care to recall. You’re an easy target when you don’t have the political pull to point out the absurdity of what’s going on.
        mattbuilds 5y ago
        What’s always been surprising to me is that more people don’t recognize it. My background didn’t give me the education I’m wish I had either, in fact I got the opposite. But it didn’t take all that long in the real world to see it. Maybe people just accept what they see and roll with it.