(2023-06-18) Cutler Tbm227 Explicit Vs Implicit Strategy

John Cutler: TBM 227: Explicit vs. Implicit Strategy. I've been (slowly) reading Richard Rumelt's new book, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

A couple of years ago, an executive shared: while the quality of a strategy matters, it is the translation of the strategy into tangible things like goals and budgets that matters to most people in the organization.

But let's consider how this plays out in most organizations.

Talking about challenges is difficult, especially when they are internal challenges. Making the call on the most important addressable challenges is also challenging.

Imagine a savvy product leader. They know 1) strategy is hard, and 2) it all boils down to tangible byproducts. You have a choice: keep asking questions about the high-level strategy, or form your personal view of what has to be done and make sure your OWN goals, budgets, forecasts, and roadmaps are generally coherent.

As the product leader, which option do you chose? Most choose the latter. It is natural and tempting. The net result: either 1) less good strategies, or 2) good strategies that no one really understand outside of the manifestations of those strategies. Neither is good.

What can you do about this problem? There's no silver bullet.

Carve out TIME to have the hard discussions—no strategy emerges fully formed

And then focus on deployment because the leader I mentioned earlier had a point: for most people, a strategy isn't real until it manifests in all the practices, incentives, and constraints surrounding your team.