Why Passion is Not Enough: The Three Steps to Effective Strategy

Big Picture

Passion, vision or compelling goals do not translate to good strategy. History is littered with people who were passionate about right causes, but failed for lack of right strategy. Popular stories are of passionate visionaries, who overcame the odds. Below I share a brief history of millions of passionate people who paid the ultimate price.

Why should you care?

Histories are written by victors, biographies are about successful people, but little is told about visionaries with even hotter passions who failed. This skews our thinking into, if we have a clear vision and are passionate, then success is ours.

Real life story

It was 1914 in Europe. Jubilant crowds in European cities were cheering their young men to war. With hats in the air they march to prove themselves.

European societies believed what gave an edge in life was "willpower, spirit, morale and aggressiveness". For 3 years generals threw passionate men into no man's land, to be shredded by machine guns. It was a brutal and costly trench war.

Passion was not enough to turn the tide for the allied forces. It was a combination of improved strategy, luck and more resources. The United States joined them in 1917 and political unrest in Germany and Austria-Hungary diverted the Central Powers' attention. When they finally sat down at Versailles to really punish the Germans for the war in 1918, the blood of 16 million people had flowed in vain.

Despite the need for a clear strategy, we are often regaled about why passion is the key to success. Hidden in the passionate visionary stories are the realities of luck and good strategy.

The stories about the conquering human spirit are uplifting, but after being swept away by the beautiful story, we need to come back and coldly dissect the likely causes of success. Only then can we learn the right strategy which we can apply to our own situation.

Lesson

This is where Richard Rumelt in his seminal book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy offers a useful three step approach to strategy. He says you should identify the problem, set up policies and then take strategic action.

to 1) Identify the problem: What problem in the market or organisation do you want to solve? For example let's look at the current success of Flysafair. From an outsider's perspective, the problem they seem to have identified? was that airlines in SA were taking departure and arrival times as suggestions. On the other hand passengers wanted to get to their destination on time for meetings.

2) The right policies: These are the general guidelines towards resolving the strategic problem you identified. For example what are the guiding principle for Flysafair, to resolving the problem of not departing on time?

3) Strategic Action: these are the processes which need to be completed in order to be successful. For FlySafair, these strategic actions could be having tighter controls on service partners like employees and refuelling companies.

Bottom line

The key to successful strategic action is not passion, but identifying and solving the right problem. We shouldn't be fooled by beautiful stories about passion, but look deeper in order to discern luck from brilliant strategic action. What strategic problem is your organisation trying to solve?