TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read)
Simple and clear enables you to guide staff
Strategy fills the gap between a vision and what your people do every day
The connectedness between vision, strategy and tactics is critical for success
Is a strategy's simplicity and clarity more critical than its cleverness?
When I moved to Vancouver to start the Long View office, I had an academic understanding of strategy from my MBA but no practical experience.
I was aligned with the core values. Long View's brand was strong, and we excelled at culture. I had internalized the vision, but still, something was missing.
I couldn't reconcile how I knew if the things the people were busy doing were leading to the visionary outcomes we were trying to create.
As I learned, what I needed was a strategy.
Strategy is the connective tissue between a visionary aspiration and what the people in the business are doing. I needed to make the connection in simple, clear terms and repeat it repeatedly.
The strategy for Long View in BC became clear. It dictated that we had to grow and be profitable by carefully adding culturally aligned, highly skilled staff. They would service a cultivated set of customers who wanted a partner rather than just a supplier.
We intended to be a high-growth company, so decision-making needed to be distributed and enabled to be as close to the problems as possible.
We would not be the low-cost provider; our differentiation was our people, and services was our game.
As you can tell, the strategy was not all that novel. It was undoubtedly replicable by anyone who wanted to try, and our moat was that it was not easy to do.
The secret was the interconnected set of capabilities required for the business to succeed. There were explicit decisions about what we would or would not do for our people and our customers in service of our vision.
Everything we did, from managing sales to corporate structure to the performance management process, affectionately called a "career life plan," was created to support the idea that if we enable and support our people, they will care for our customers.
Management focused on providing an excellent experience for our staff. Educated, committed, and engaged staff would take care of our customers. If there is an issue, we will make it right for the two primary stakeholders at the company's expense.
Our core values became the measuring stick for evaluating performance, not a rule book.
Of course, there were tradeoffs we had to accept, and we made our fair share of mistakes.
I have never been more engaged or invested in building someone else's company as I was when I was at Long View.
My advisory work is influenced by my experience aligning vision, strategy, and tactics. I emphasize simplicity, clarity, alignment, and connectedness over cleverness.
Most organizations I engage with have an aspirational statement about what they are trying to achieve and they have an army of people working hard every day but there is rarely a clear connection between the two.
Results suffer, senior management feels frustrated, unsatisfied and unmotivated, and staff need to be more engaged.
If you are working on strategy, get focused on this formula:
Simple + clear > clever
And if you need help, you can find me.
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