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You Take Golf Lessons -- So Why Not Strategy Lessons?

Guest post by: David Carter

Article Overview: People tend to assume that strategic thinking comes naturally, but nothing could be further from the truth. Strategy only looks easy with hindsight. So, just as you'd take lessons in golf or tennis, you should seek to actively educate and train yourself to think more strategically.

You Take Golf Lessons -- So Why Not Strategy Lessons?

To be honest I could probably make a compare and contrast list between business strategy and sex writes Tim Berry of Business Strategy. But he decided against that. It seems like too obviously pandering to the SEO. Instead, he focuses on just this one thing business strategy has in common with sex: both are on the short list of things almost everybody assumes they do well, and for which it takes bad news to prove them wrong.

We have to learn a lot of things. You take swimming lessons, and you learn math in school. Tennis, golf? Everybody takes lessons. But you're good at strategy automatically; and, well, sorry to mention it, but also, sex. Or so we all believe.

People tend to assume that strategic thinking comes naturally, but nothing could be further from the truth. Strategy only looks easy with hindsight. So, just as you'd take lessons in golf or tennis, you should seek to actively educate and train yourself to think more strategically.

And why?

"There' s more importance today on strategy, on picking businesses, than ever before ... In the environment we're in, good execution and good operations aren't enough to fix a business with a flawed strategy. So you need to spend time understanding what businesses you think are going to work, what business models seem to make sense. Strategy is more important than ever before" (Jeff Immelt, CEO, GE, 2004).

I first realized this when I was Vice President of Business Planning with the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI, a Thomson company). We sold academic, scientific and market research easily, strategy with great difficulty. And that's because, I came to believe, everybody feels great with strategy. Don't you?

The problem is that a good strategy does often seem obvious, but only after it becomes visible. The hard part is to think it up before it's obvious.

Those who are successful strategic thinkers all share the special skill I call Diagonal Thinking(tm). Oscillating effortlessly between logical or rational thinking, and creative or lateral thinking, they are able to analyze a company's business and then make creative leaps based on their findings.

Jack Welch has said, "Strategy is not a lengthy action plan. It is the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances."

Can you state your strategy (central idea) simply and concisely in a statement or theme?

Contact David Paul Carter for help to educate and train yourself to think more strategically.

__________________________________________________________________________

Based on a blog posting by Tim Berry in Business Strategy.

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Article Tags: David Paul Carter, Jack Welch, strategic thinking



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