Why Strategy Matters...

With work moving at an unbelievable pace, Capgemini's SAP leadership deliberately takes sometime off to review its strategy. This is not about doing status report outs, not talking tactical moves, and definitely not falling trap to all things we plan and discuss on a regular basis. Instead the core team comes together to envision the future and why our journey to get there matters. I relate these sessions we have, to a quote I read years ago from Sun Tzu: Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

I am obviously not detailing anything we are doing (it's my personal reflection and doesn't reflect Capgemini's sentiments) but, I'll definitely share my thoughts on why strategy matters, and how Capgemini's vision of the Renewable Enterprise played (and continues to play) a pivotal part in shaping the SAP market!

There are multiple definitions to strategy, from, "... choosing what not to do ...", to, "... achieving organizations broader business goals ...". Over the last couple of years, I got to be part of something pretty unique that went beyond definitions. Capgemini decided to bring together a one of a kind core team for a few days to share thoughts and bring together a coherent, bold, winning set of themes and choices, that would form a strategy around what was, surely, a changing SAP world. Some of the smartest minds I was surrounded with in that room, did exactly that and more! As I recollect those names and faces, some of them have picked up newer roles within Capgemini, a small handful took the difficult decision to pursue their careers elsewhere, and luckily some still remain!

The session took shape once we arrived with a hypothesis on the state of the market. Understanding 'Why we are doing, What we do' - brought about a level of sophisticated simplicity to our purpose and we began to align ourselves to something more fundamental than the flurry of activities that business-as-usual dictates in the short term. Back in 2018, we saw SAP as a company that was setting itself for change. 25 years to move from R/3 to S/4 (the next 25 being bet too) and with all those acquisitions coming along - we saw some common themes: cloud being prominent. A bunch of similar thoughts, based on facts and indications, brought about a hypothesis. If SAP was heading down a path of becoming a cloud company, we asked ourselves questions - What are the changes we will see in the way SAP will operate? How would the SAP ecosystem unfold? What would be our key strength and story to focus on that one big thing that would define and set Capgemini apart from everyone else to our customers?

The world we wanted to see needed to be realistic, something that resonated / made sense, identify areas we couldn't control and have actions to get where we wanted to go. The customer always decides - so what can I do that will have customers like our offering and strategy? And because we would do this for the very first time, how do we make them believe that our thinking, our offering, our team was the best (better than everyone else they were speaking to)? We couldn't prove our strategy in advance. Only time would tell if the bets were placed right. Placing a bet required moving the market to believe in our position aligned to their future.

So, the amazing team came ahead and started defining the Renewable Enterprise. No slides. We put pen to paper to write something down (I think I still have a picture and that piece of paper). A few bullet points on a single page. No overcomplications / solutioning (although we did some sketch something to make it 2 pages), but we described why we do what we want to do; why we go where we want to go; what do we have today; what needs to work; and outlined briefly the 'how for this journey'...

For too long the world customized the ERP core. Managing the pace of business and technology disruption was a problem. The world of cloud worked different in terms of agility, delivery, skill etc. We needed a core that was clean/lean, with an API & Microservices-based architecture to keep the intelligence/differentiation at the edge.

The result, we were ahead of the curve. We changed thing internally. We had partners in the ecosystem thrilled with the idea. We had analysts endorse our hypothesis. We had SAP give a thumbs-up, and last but not the least, the one thing we couldn't control - that fell into place - clients trusted what we said and picked us as their trusted advisor & partner of choice!

The 7 values of Honesty, Boldness, Trust, Freedom, Fun, Modesty, and Team Spirit – express our personality, our spirit. And that embodies our strategy! I personally believe this is what differentiates companies and why some have the edge. They take time to think :) I'm curious to hear your take on the topic of 'strategy' and please share some of your "in hindsight" stories!