How do you recognize a bullsh*t strategy?

One, they are expressed as goals, without saying anything about how to reach those goals.

Two, they are generic and shared by pretty much all the other brands and companies in your category.

Three, they are fluffy and written in such a loose and broad way that there are no obvious actions falling out of it. What does "leverage synergies" mean? What do you do with that?

A strategy is the unique value a business provides to the market.

A unique value is the benefit your customers get from your product, which they can't get anywhere else, and which a hell of a lot of people want or need.

The intellectual content of a strategy - the thinking behind it - is only half the battle. The other half is converting that thinking into a strategy that is actually usable.

So what can you do?

You can put your strategy through the subjectivity test where you remove all subjective language, anything like 'good', 'great', 'world-class', 'best' and 'smart', and see if there are any substance left.

You could also play the opposite game where you ask yourself if the opposite of your strategy also make logical sense. If the answer is yes, then you probably have a good strategy on your hands because it represents a true strategic choice.

PowerPoint or Word?

Most strategies float around in "The Deck". A nice long PowerPoint presentation with a few pillars, onions, missions, visions, and the like. A PowerPoint lets you get away with all the things that wouldn't fly in a conversation or email.

Instead, just write it the way you'd tell it. 

A single page of A4 with a few paragraphs of argument and explanation, culminating in the punchline ("therefore we are going to do X"). Your job is simply to explain it so that anyone who reads it, gets it.

There should be no difference between your written explanation and your spoken one.

Even a super-crisp strategy is still, ultimately, going to be fairly abstract, so it's important you really land the idea (and get the ball rolling) by listing some key actions arising from it.
  • What must you do to deliver on this?
  • What needs to change?
  • What do you need to stop doing?
  • What needs to be added?

If a strategy doesn't prompt ideas automatically then it has a problem - probably one of being too abstract, and not practically grounded enough.

"No Bullsh*t strategy" by Alex M H Smith

Let's turn the ship around

Why do we need empowerment?

What must leaders overcome mentally and emotionally to give up control yet retain full responsibility? Do you give employees specific goals as well as the freedom to meet them in any way they choose? Or do people really just want to do as they are told?

Leader-follower

In a leader-follower structure followers take orders and do what they are told to do. They rely on the leader to make all decisions. 

They have limited decision making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy and passion. 

You must release them instead. Recognize their inherent genius and creativity, and allow those talents to emerge. Let them make meaningful decisions. 

Are you as leader willing to be vulnerable to the effects of their decisions?

Turn disempowered phrases like 

  • "I would like to", 
  • "Could we", 
  • "What should I do about" 

... into empowered phrases like 

  • "We intend to", 
  • "We plan on", 
  • "We will". 

Ask people to state their intentions. Let them make meaningful decisions. Turn passive followers into active leaders.

Rather than giving specific lists of tasks, give broad guidance and context and tell them to prepare the tasks instead. Don't tell people to do stuff they already know they have to do. 

Resist the urge to provide solutions.

When the performance of a unit goes down after leaders leave, it is taken as a sign that they were good leaders, not that they were ineffective in training their people properly.

What comes first, mindset or behavior?

Instead of trying to change mindsets and then change the way you act, start acting differently and the new thinking will follow. You can choose to change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.

Empowerment does not work without competence and clarity. The new decision makers must have a higher level of technical knowledge and clearer sense of organizational purpose than ever before. This is leadership.

When you explain a change, people hear and think they know what you mean, but they don't. They have never had a picture of what you are talking about. They can't see in their imagination how it works. Think out loud. Be honest about what you intend to achieve and communicate that all the time, at every level.

That's how you turn a ship around.

Technical Leadership

How can I be a leader and keep up my technical skills at the same time? 

What can I do to learn leadership? Why do people see me as a leader, when I don't feel that way? If I'm a leader, will I have to boss people around? What is leadership, anyway?

Leadership is the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered. Each person is unique, so we can expect many different leadership styles, and we must be able to switch appropriately from one to another as the situation demands.

The best technical leaders have a problem-solving leadership style. They have one thing in common: A faith that there's always a better way. Their entire orientation is toward creating an environment in which everyone can solve problems, making decisions, and implementing those decisions as required to get the job done.

The most widespread and harmful myth about leadership is that only Leaders can lead, where the capital L indicates that someone has been appointed to the position of Leader. There are, in fact, many more potential leaders than Leaders. You may have no title at all, but be the one who makes your group start to function in new and more effective ways.

People don't become leaders because they never fail. They become leaders because of the way they react to failure.

If you are a leader, the people are your work. In a complex environment, even the most task-oriented leader is forced to put people first, or the task won't get done.

Power is not a possession, but a relationship. You possess expertise. Any power you get from expertise is based on a relationship between you and someone else. 

Your software engineering expertise would contribute no power if you lead a mountain climbing team. If your whole team consists of novice developers, your expertise will give you considerable power. If your team are also experts like you, they will pay more attention to your organizational power.

Easier said than done. Most innovators who move into leadership positions know little or nothing about organizational power. Thus, the new leader needs new powers just when technical power is about to slip away.

If people don't want your help, you will never succeed in helping them, no matter how smart or wonderful you are. Always check whether people want your help. Attempts to help are often interpreted as attempts to interfere. 

Effective help can only start with mutual agreement on a clear definition of the problem.

Not everyone likes being a leader, but many are slow to realize that they don't. By the time they do, they have usually lost the skills or attitudes or illusions that would let them move back to their old status. Think about why you want to be a leader, and all the assets and liabilities you have as a leader.

"Becoming a Technical Leader" by Gerald M. Weinberg

Hidden potential

Everyone has hidden potential, but how do we unlock it?

Character

Is it about building character skills, like how often do you take initiative to ask questions? Do you react to what enters your field of vision, or are you proactive in seeking new knowledge, skills and perspectives? Do you focus on feeding your ego or fueling your growth?

Perfectionism

Unlocking hidden potential is not about the pursuit of perfection. Be disciplined in deciding when to push for the best and when to settle for good enough. Don't obsess by details and to find the right solution on tiny problems that don't matter. Find the right problems to solve instead.

Passion

Although it takes deliberate practice to achieve greater things, we shouldn't drill so hard that we drive the joy out of the activity and turn it into an obsessive slog. Persistence is more likely to translate into performance when passion is present.

Breaks

Take breaks. They help you unlock fresh ideas, deepen your learning and sustain your harmonious passion. Even micro-breaks of five to ten minutes are enough to reduce fatigue and raise energy.

Side hustle

When asking people what it takes to achieve greater things, one of the most common answers is that you need to be laser focused and single-minded in your dedication. Get in early, go home late. Put your hobbies away. But the evidence tells a different story. Hobbies or a side hustle can be a source of energy - if they are in a different area from your job.

Learn from experts?

Do we learn more from experts? If you are taking a new road, the best experts are often the worst guides. One reason is the distance they have traveled - they have come too far to remember what it's like being in your shoes.

You need to make experts' implicit knowledge explicit. Ask them to retrace their route. Get them to drop pins - the key landmarks and turning points from their climbs, the crossroads they faced, skills they sought out, advice they took or ignored, or changes they made.

A sense of progress

The strongest known force in daily motivation is a sense of progress. Achieving this doesn't require huge gains. Fuel can come from small wins. With a few small wins, you start to gain speed.

A rocky start followed by later success

It's a mistake to judge people solely by the heights they have reached. We need to consider how steep their slope was, how far they have climbed, and how they have grown along the way. Early failure and a rocky start followed by later success is a mark of hidden potential. The key question is not how long people have done a job. Find out what they have learned and how well they can learn to do a job.

Read

A love of reading often begins at home. If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read. 

Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we value.

"Hidden Potential" by Adam Grant

Strategy, strategy and strategy

... or shall we call it an action agenda? 

I loved the conversation between Professor Richard Rumelt and Lenny Rachitsky at Lenny's Newsletter.

Goals, ambitions, visions, missions, values, wished-for end states - none of these things are a strategy.

And it's not true that these things have to be in place before you can have a strategy. Strategies are fundamentally about what you’ll do in response to a challenge. Strategy is problem solving, and you cannot solve a problem you don't understand. 

As understanding deepens, the strategist seeks the crux - the one challenge that both is critical and appears to be solvable.

What makes up a good strategy?

A diagnosis of the situation. Figure out what's going on here and understand the challenge you face. The challenge can be to deal with change and competition, it can be triggered by a large opportunity or it can be internal like outdated routines, bureaucracy, or lack of collaboration.

A guiding policy, i.e. what will you do and what will you not do with the challenge. It is "guiding" because it channels actions in certain directions without defining exactly what shall be done.

A set of coherent actions that will carry out the guiding policy. This part is so easy to leave out because people like to think of strategy as a high level conceptual thing. Strategy is about action. There must be enough clarity about action to bring concepts down to earth.

When deciding what you will do with the challenge, find your source of advantage. Do you know something that others don't? Do you have a skill that others don't have? Do you have a reputation, brand or existing market system that others cannot replicate? Do you have scale, technology, experience or other resources that others don't have?

A bad strategy is fluff and fails to face the challenge, it lacks the diagnosis. If you don't frame the challenge it is difficult to assess the quality of the strategy.

Another mistake is to treat goals as a strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles. Good strategic objectives are the outcome of a strategy, not its input.

Bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy. One common reason for choosing avoidance is the pain or difficulty of choice.

Good strategy requires leaders who are willing to and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests.

Strategy is not mysterious. It is about solving the most important problem you are facing. You need to be focused on something doable and be consistent about it.