Strategy
David Amerland ????
Working on a new book. Can't tell you on what just yet, but I currently share snippets of the insights I gleam as I write.
Strategy in a business is a top-down affair. Some of this is due to the military origin of business organization where ranks and hierarchies created a construct along which flowed information from those who were in charge to those who had to execute ‘the plan’. Some of it is down to human nature which finds it difficult to implement anything on trust alone and needs the reassurance of such rigid hierarchies in the first place.
This dismal picture is, thankfully, about to change. And real change, as always, starts from the bottom up. First there are the consumers, who got tired being told about Product, Place, Price and Promotion, in every which way and opted instead, in an organic and tech-assisted way, to work on Experience, Everywhere, Exchange and Evangelism .
That change, given the nature of its origin, started from outside the walls of enterprise (of any scale) but soon made itself felt within. The pressure it applied necessitated a transition. This transition, in turn, made it imperative to rethink Jerome McCarthy’s Marketing Mix to one where the 4Ps of interest are: Purpose, Presence, Proximity and Partnerships .
This more closely aligned expectations outside the business (i.e. the target audience) with the business itself, its image and messaging. But even this was not enough. The reason it wasn’t enough is because it is never sufficient to change how a business is perceived cosmetically if you don’t also undertake real change within to reduce the friction that is created by the cognitive dissonance that results when marketing messaging and a business’ public image do not coincide with what is really happening inside it.
领英推荐
Which brings us now to strategy. It’s not that it ain’t important. It really is and paying attention to its granular components is never a substitute for heart-warming, life-affirming homilies, no matter how much we’d like it to be. But strategy that used to be a set of orders born out of the perceived reality that dictated them, has now morphed into a set of behaviors that require a mindset shift in employees, support from a business’ culture and the wholesale understanding of the purpose behind it all, to succeed.
The 21st century business is being reshaped by a combination of resource pressures, shifting social values and ubiquitous technology. This is an environment that exists both within and without a business. In this environment, traditional command-and-control systems no longer hold the swat they once did, nor do they deliver the outcomes they once promised.
In a 2023 report McKinsey identified the need for evolution in the traditional strategy and leadership model of a business as a shift towards greater inclusivity of stakeholders that cedes command to collaboration, control to evolution and competition to cocreation.
Each business, of course, is unique because of the combination of its size, its resources, the talent that drives and the passion that sustains it. What is not unique however is the very real to now do things differently. The traditional strategy and leadership models that got us so far have outlived their expiration date. The 21st century is the time to evolve into something that has a future.