Strategy in a 'Structural Break' | BNET - The Diigo Meta page

• 08 Apr 09
  

  Bertrand Duperrin

  There is nothing like a crisis to clarify the mind. In suddenly volatile and different times, you must have a strategy. I don’t mean most of the things people call strategy—mission statements, audacious goals, three- to five-year budget plans. I mean a real strategy.
  
  For many managers, the word has become a verbal tic. Business lingo has transformed marketing into marketing strategy, data processing into IT strategy, acquisitions into growth strategy. Cut prices and you have a low-price strategy. Equating strategy with success, audacity, or ambition creates still more confusion. A lot of people label anything that bears the CEO’s signature as strategic—a definition based on the decider’s pay grade, not the decision.

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  • The wrong way forward in a structural break during hard times is to try more of the same. The break and the hard times are sure indications that an old pattern has already been pushed to its limits and is destroying value.
  • Complexity also manifests itself in the soaring volume of e-mail. Philip Su, a Windows Vista software engineering manager, reports that the intensity of coordination on this project created “a phenomenon by which process engenders further process, eventually becoming a self-sustaining buzz.”
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  • • In part, this rising administrative intensity shows the increasing importance of knowledge-based workers and the outsourcing of manual labor. It also reflects a more intense commitment to very complex systems comprising individual parts whose productivity is almost impossible to measure.

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