Winning - Jack Welch [56]
As hard as it sounds, try to remember in the heat of it all that eventually the flames will die down. And they will die down because of what you do. You will face the enormity of the problem and own its solution, while at the same time running the business as if there is a tomorrow.
Then one day, you will realize tomorrow has arrived. The smoke will have cleared, and the damaged parts of the structure will have been replaced or repaired.
You will never be happy for what happened, but stepping back, you’ll see something that might surprise you—the whole place looks better than ever.
YOUR COMPETITION
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11. STRATEGY
It’s All in the Sauce
12. BUDGETING
Reinventing the Ritual
13. ORGANIC GROWTH
So You Want to Start Something New
14. MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS
Deal Heat and Other Deadly Sins
15. SIX SIGMA
So You Want to Start Something New
11
Strategy
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IT’S ALL IN THE SAUCE
MORE THAN A FEW TIMES over the past three years, I have been on a speaking program or at a business conference with one big strategy guru or another. And more than a few times, I have listened to their presentations in disbelief.
It’s not that I don’t understand their theories about competitive advantage, core competencies, virtual commerce, supply chain economics, disruptive innovation, and so on, it’s just that the way these experts tend to talk about strategy—as if it is some kind of high-brain scientific methodology—feels really off to me.
I know that strategy is a living, breathing, totally dynamic game.
It’s fun—and fast. And it’s alive.
Forget the arduous, intellectualized number crunching and data grinding that gurus say you have to go through to get strategy right. Forget the scenario planning, yearlong studies, and hundred-plus-page reports. They’re time-consuming and expensive, and you just don’t need them.
In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.
Yes, theories can be interesting, charts and graphs can be beautiful, and big, fat stacks of PowerPoint slides can make you feel like you’ve done your job. But you just should not make strategy too complex. The more you think about it, and the more you grind down into the data and details, the more you tie yourself in knots about what to do.*
That’s not strategy, that’s suffering.
Now, I don’t want to write off strategy gurus. Some of their concepts have merit.
But I do want to disagree with the scientific approach to strategy that they propagate. It is taught in many business schools, peddled by countless consulting firms, and practiced in far too many corporate headquarters.
It’s just so unproductive! If you want to win, when it comes to strategy, ponder less and do more.
I’m certainly not alone in this view. In speaking with many thousands of businesspeople around the world, I can count the number of strategy questions on one hand. Virtually every other topic—from managing a temperamental employee to the dollar’s effect on trade—gets more interest by orders of magnitude.
Obviously, everyone cares about strategy. You have to. But most managers I know see strategy as I do—an approximate course of action that you frequently revisit and redefine, according to shifting market conditions. It is an iterative process and not nearly as theoretical or life-and-death as some would have you believe.
Given this view, you may be wondering what I’m going to say in this chapter.
The answer is, nothing that’s going to get me tenure!
Instead, I’m going to describe how to do strategy in three steps. Over my career, this approach worked incredibly well across varied businesses and industries, in upturns and downturns, and in competitive situations from Mexico to Japan. Who knows—maybe its simplicity was part of its success.
The steps are:
First, come up with a big aha for your business—a smart, realistic, relatively fast way to gain sustainable competitive