I'm sorry HBR, I disagree - Strategy absolutely belongs on the ground floor.

(7 Questions Every Part Of Your Business Must Answer)

For those short on time - here are the key takeaways:

• Strategy is about proactivity and clarity of value.
• Therefore strategy belongs, not just in the board room, but also on the ground floor.

Leave that kind thinking to the board room…

A few weeks ago the Harvard Business Review posted an article called “Keep Strategy Simple”. Naturally - I was curious. The majority of my work is helping clients create strategic clarity so they can make the shifts needed to achieve it - often through either new operating models or through targeted portfolios of change initiatives.

Unfortunately I was sorely disappointed.*

The author Graham Kenny proposed that businesses should “Confine “strategy” to the business level” and advised against developing strategic plans for functions. The crux of his reasoning is bolded in the quote below:

“What struck me was the number of “strategic plans” they had. One each for Marketing, HR, and IT. And each contained a list of actions. …Marketing is a process or, if you prefer, an activity carried out by individuals. (The “ing” on the word tells you that.) So, if you couple “marketing” with “strategic plan” the result is most likely to become a list of actions carried out by individuals.”

Which is essentially saying that you, as a business unit leader shouldn’t bother thinking strategically because you’re just too action oriented. You’re a cog in the machine.

Leave that kind thinking to the board room.

And sorry, but that’s bullshit.

If your senior and mid level managers aren’t thinking strategically, then you’re in big trouble. And if you can get your ground-floor staff doing so too, even better.

Strategy is about proactivity.

Strategy is about value.

Strategy is about understanding and adapting to your context.

Strategy is about defining and providing value.

Strategy is about positioning.

Strategy is also about choosing how.

All of that is absolutely applicable to internal company functions. In fact, not only are they applicable, but they’re sorely needed!

Internal Leaders Are Crying Out For It

Fun Fact: In the pursuit of getting to know my customers better, I spent August scouring the last 3yrs of Mecro Group’s sales call notes. Calls with business leaders from corporate to ops, from juniors to execs, from new starts to lifers.

Want to know the most common challenge?

Proactivity.

“We’re caught in the day to day.” “We’re caught in the weeds.” “We need to shift our focus from outputs to outcomes.”

However the most common threads were:

First - “We want to provide the business more value”.

Second - “We want the business to see us as valuable”**

Both are the domain of internal strategy. While I agree with Graham’s assessment that many internal strategies are strategies in name only (and that calling them an action plan would be more accurate), that doesn’t mean that there isn’t the need for group or even unit level strategies.

After all, every layer of an organsiation should be able to clearly answer the following 7 questions for their own area:

1. Why are we here? - What problem do we solve?
2. What value do we provide?
3. How do we provide that value?
4. What’s changing around us? - How do we need to adapt?
5. How do we want people see us?
6. How should we prioritise our limited resources?
7. and What are we doing to improve on the value we provide?

Interestingly this is in direct contrast to what Gartner calls ‘Successful Functional Strategic Planning’ - which really is rather close to an action plan….

Strategy on the Ground Floor

It’s not divisive, it’s crucial.

And no, done right, it won’t create siloes. (Plus they exist anyway… and aren’t always a bad thing.)

Businesses are complex systems, and while they absolutely need a clear and cohesive top-level business strategy to rally around, each function, and even each team also need their own.

Because if you’re not clear on the value you’re delivering the rest of the business - well… in this current economic environment - you may want to get clear. Quick-smart.

*PS. It’s worth nothing that for full transparency, I do agree with a bunch of other things that Graham proposes in the article.

**Another fun fact - the most common version of this is “we want to be seen as a trusted and valued internal strategic partner”

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