I’m going to try not to be too dismissive of the state of current or traditional business strategy or its process and tools but strategy has clearly not kept pace with advance- ments in other business domains and functions.
I know this sounds alarmist but the current state of business strategy training and prac- tice is so broken that it is in crisis. Not only are traditional strategic tools and processes woefully inadequate (and, mostly, always were), their deficiencies are keeping compa- nies from staying relevant in the marketplace—at an alarming rate.
In 2019, McKinsey & Company, one of the most venerated sources of strategic consult- ing, published an eye-popping report* on what they term “zombie” companies: those companies that are unable to create real value or growth, either in the marketplace or for themselves (including their stakeholders and shareholders). These are companies you probably already suspect: Sears, Macy*s, K-Mart, etc. And, not only those that have already failed or the ones you can’t understand why they’re still in business. These are companies that seem successful, ones you may even admire.
The conclusion of McKinsey’s research is that 85% of all companies, worldwide, whether they’re private or public, are zombies! Your read that correctly (I even double- checked after my editor made their way through the manuscript). 85%!
These companies include those who can’t service their debt—they’re unable to make payments on the money they’ve borrowed), as well as those who can only pay the interest but cannot make progress on the borrowed principle). It also includes companies who may not have debt but can only manage to pay their expenses and either don’t make a profit, make very little, or can’t fund initiatives for research, development, or evolution. Since every company needs to be constantly evolving in order to stay relevant to customers, they too join the ranks of the walking corporate dead.
These zombie companies are in statis—not growing, not evolving, barely able to stay afloat—but working really hard to do so (the market is not full of friends).
Now, if you’re McKinsey, perhaps this is where you pull-out your slide deck and pro- motional materials to tell companies that they should hire McKinsey instead of whom- ever they currently trust to develop their strategy (if they have one). But, the unspo- ken revelation, here, is a serious one: most of these companies already “do” strategy, whether internally or with a consultancy, and it’s not producing results! This should scare every organization in the world (including non-profits and government agencies) and embarrass every strategic consultant.
Now, I suppose we could write off a lot of those strategies as inferior or poorly imple- mented—which often means that implementation wasn’t baked-into the strategy—or that the organizations ignored the advice they got. All of this may be true, but the 85% figure still points to a massive cause for alarm: typical approaches to strategy (models, process, tools, etc.) simply aren’t cutting it. The state of the art is one of decay.
It gets even worse: another recent McKinsey report* describes the results of a global survey concerning ecological concerns for leaders. While it appears that 83% of those companies surveyed have now set targets for climate change (and I really question whether these targets are adequate or meaningful), very few have set targets for any other ecological concerns, including fresh water, forests, biodiversity, pollution, etc. Again, the strategy that companies are preparing aren’t addressing some of the most important issues of our times. At best, these issues are bolted onto traditional processes and not integrated, dynamic components.
This is why we need new approaches, ones that are updated with current understandings of business, economics, markets, and people; ones that integrate what’s typically left out of traditional strategy. We need to challenge the oversimplifications and assumptions that have been made up to this point that were built on learnings from 50-or-so years ago.
That’s what I plan to do in this book. I’ve been teaching business principles, including strategy, to not-your-typical business professions for 15 years and practicing new approaches to strategy for many years before that. Growing professionally in the revolutionary, non-traditional interactive media industry has provided me a valuable perspective on what has changed in business what hasn’t, and how we can move for- ward with new understandings and build them into new models, processes, and tools. In short, I’ve spent the last 15 years focused on redesigning strategy. I’ve been evolving the models and descriptions of the tools we need for this century’s organizations.
I learned strategy from a variety of sources but, mostly in practice. I have an MBA in Sustainable Management, from Presidio Graduate School, so I was fortunate to learn about business from a different—and better—frame, not “business as usual.” This bet- ter prepared me for the world today with challenges and contexts that weren’t present even 20 years ago. In addition, I’ve consulted for a variety of companies and non-profit organizations for over 30 years, via my company, vivid studios, an early Internet pioneer, as well as my private consulting in business, experience, and brand strategy ever since. My strategy experience started long before, back in 1993 working with Regis McKenna, a marketing pioneer from Silicon Valley back in the early Apple days (more on him later) where he taught me and my colleagues his CRUSH approach to accelerated, better market strategy.
Since those days, I’ve worked for startups and large companies alike, as well as non- profits. I’ve worked for consumer packaged goods companies, tech firms, telcos, crypto startups, consumer electronics companies, sports equipment manufacturers, etc. Lastly, I started an MBA program in 2007 (the MBA in Design Strategy) as a way of teaching business in a new way—particularly innovation and strategy—and the model, process, and understandings in this book reflect that 30 year+ journey.
Most strategy is bad, slow and expensive.
I know that header is an incendiary statement, but if you get a couple drinks into a strategic consultant (or the client of one), most will agree. Now, people will reserve a varying sliver of the market as the exception (great strategy) and they will locate them- selves in that sliver, but they will still secretly agree with this statement. And, most will agree with “slow and expensive,” regardless.
In his book, Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, Richard P. Rumelt describes bad strategy as having one or more of four characteristics:
- Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments. It uses “Sunday” words (words that are inflated and unnecessarily abstruse) and apparently esoteric concepts to create the illusion of high-level thinking.
- Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognize or define the challenge. When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it.
- Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles.
- Bad strategic objectives. A strategic objective is set by a leader as a means to an end. Strategic objectives are “bad” when they fail to address critical issues orwhen they are impracticable.
There are many reasons for this:
- Strategy requires you to research information from different domains and from many different sources.
- Great strategy requires the involvement of several people inside an organization, which requires time, focus, and money.
- Most strategy relies on filling in templates—often simply downloaded from the Internet—and these templates are (and always have been) inadequate.
- Because strategy requires us to consider so many different perspectives and sources, we usually look for shortcuts to speed things up or make things easier and it is exactly these shortcuts that often invalidate the very data that we expect to inform us.
- Most strategy only reviews quantitative data because it is the easiest to obtain and use and because business culture (and, increasingly, culture-writ-large) favors numbers as being more important, more accurate, and more relevant). Yet ignoring qualitative data, particularly about customers and employees is respon- sible for much of the most public and spectacular market losses on record.In addition to the reasons above, qualitative data is also the best source of innovation— it’s just more difficult to collect and analyze.
Current Strategy Tools are Inadequate
Here is a story of the typical approach to strategy. This is fictional but I assure you that it is absolutely typical of strategy work as taught in business schools and practiced in organizations of all types and sizes at all levels.
Consider this startup in the process of creating their first strategic plan: Quan, Mellissa, Gerald, and Song found each other at their last company and have left to start a com- pany around their “big idea.” They do as Melissa was taught in business school—she has an MBA after all: they download a SWOT template and another for Positioning Statements. They break into two teams to accomplish more, faster. Mellissa and Quan take the SWOT and Gerald and Song work on the Positioning Statement. They give themselves an hour and then they review where each team is together.
Melissa and Quan start listing strengths and weaknesses:
Strengths:
• We’re all from Ivy League schools
• They don’t yet have any customers
• We have experience working in the industry
• They need manufacturing partners
Weaknesses:
• They understand the manufacturing process needed
• They don’t yet have a sales channel
Opportunities:
• They have a unique idea
• If they move quickly, they can define the category
• None of their competitors is yet in the Metaverse
Threats:
• The market may change quickly
• Their old company could quickly copy their idea
All of the above is typical. They already have a solution, they know their market, they have some experience in the space, etc. The SWOT analysis is helping them identify what to focus on and what to worry about. I imagine you’ve already figured out what lies ahead for them but we’ll leave these two for the moment and check in with Gerald and Song.
Positioning Statement:
For customers who need the best multiplexing solution
We offer a mutliplexing subscription service
Which benefits them by managing their communications more efficiently and in a 3D display As opposed to our competitor, Tired Corp,
Which offer only spreadsheet-based data plexing.
The four come back together after an hour and agree that they’ve focused on the most important factors and are gratified that their positioning statement is so clear—and so quickly. It’s exactly as they’ve discussed before and it matches their past research into the market. They’re now ready to do some competitive analysis to see how they might compare to their old company, Tired Corp and the others currently in the market.
I know this sounds incredibly, incredulously obvious, but this is how strategy is taught in nearly every business program and how much strategy is performed. Even larger firms and “name brand” consultants perform fancier versions of these same exercises, replete with the same errors. What’s wrong with this approach?
Nearly everything.
First, none of the identified factors in either tool correspond to the items identified in the other. If they are accurate, Gerald and Song;s findings don’t relate at all to Melissa and Quan’s. There’s no connection between these two activities. How do we reconcile them? Which are more important? Which are based on which? These processes were done in parallel, with no corresponding sequence, requiring us to untangle them in order to reconcile their disparity and move on. A better approach would be to do one (perhaps the SWOT) and use that as the basis for the other. At least, then, they would relate to each other. However, I’ll show you how a SWOT isn’t even necessary as it emerges automatically from the other steps in the process. You should never draft another SWOT in your career!
Next, how do any of them know these are the best answers—or that any of them are accurate. Is the Metaverse a sound opportunity? Are they the only ones in the category? Will the market move quickly? Are customers asking for a 3D display of their dataplex- ing? None of these entries are validated in any way. Where is the proof that these are important (or even exist), let alone the proof that these factors are the most important?
I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous that this is how most strategy is done. I assure you, however, that it’s true—certainly of startups and smaller companies who don’t have the resources to hire strategists, but these problems also true of many, many established, medium and large companies. Think back to that report on zombie companies. This begins to explain why 85% of companies worldwide aren’t success- fully differentiating themselves and why their strategies are so faulty.
But, there’s something even more troublesome here. Even if everything in these two “analyses” is true, so what? Do customers care that all four of these founders graduated from Ivy League schools? Are they only selling to customers in or from similar schools? Other than wanting to buy high-end products and services, do their customers care that they have experience and understand the manufacturing processes needed? Even if they did, how would they know?
This is the most critical misstep of all strategy: what are the most important decision-drivers of customer decisions. If you only take one thing from this book, this is the thing to understand. It’s discussed in detail in the first chapter, but confusing customer or company desires or trivia with actual decision-drivers is
the most fundamental misstep businesspeople make, no matter their background, education, or experience.
How Do We Fix Strategy?
This book will outline better strategy that you can manage yourself. It will help you understand just enough of your market’s context to set a strategic direction and trans- late that into successful tactics (and action)!
The Seven Laws of Strategy
The most important things to understand about better strategy are:
- Strategy is about Context and Focus.
- Market issues should be separated from Operational issues.
- Strategy requires a thorough review of stakeholders of all types.
- Strategy is mostly about People, whether directly or by proxy.
- Where strategy is not about people, it’s about the environment that supports society and the economy.
These issues and impacts must be factored into the process:
- Great strategy requires a specific sequence of steps. The output of one step be- comes the input to the next.
- Great strategy requires new understandings of value and appreciation for how it is exchanged.
- Strategy is complex; it needs to be. However, we can bring much more clarity to the process and the results.
- The oversimplification of past and traditional strategy tools is one of the most concerning problems with strategy. Great strategy isn’t easy and easy tools lead you to inappropriate strategies.
Context
Sadly, too many businesspeople ignore the context of the market and society around them. Because business can be complex, we seek to simplify things just so we can sur- vive our responsibilities. Some of this is inevitable. You can never build an understand- ing of the entire world around you as rich as that world. It would be like comedian Steven Wright’s joke about maps: “I have a map of the United States, life size. 1 mile equals 1 mile. It’s a bitch to fold it.”
Obviously, we can’t model the world in exact detail. However, the approach most strategy processes and tools take cuts out too much context. In our desire to focus, we turn our attention away from critical details, players, issues, and impacts. Impacts such as social equity or being good neighbors are ignored, as are ecological impacts. But, also stakeholders that may become impediments (like governments, media, or NGOs) or constructive partners in success (those same partners).
The trick to better strategy is to constantly survey the landscape broadly and then nar- row our focus to the most important priorities identified by that wide perspective. This is a continuous process that repeats over and over, throughout a strategic process. It’s OK to eventually ignore issues and impacts (perhaps, a better approach is to set them aside for later) as long as our focus proceeds from a set that included all of those fac- tors. Traditional strategy just ignores them from the start.
Market vs. Operations
Traditional strategy tools also tend to mix the external with the internal and because businesspeople are paid to focus on their responsibilities (most of which are opera- tional), too often the external/market factors get deemphasized or even ignored. As you can imagine, “ignore your market” is not a strategy for success! Yet, the strategic processes businesspeople use often deprioritizes their inclusion.
In addition, because we sell into the market, these factors need to be prioritized before we consider our internal factors. Over and over, organizations decide to do things: buy services and other companies, sell things, and build capabilities without ever validating if the market necessitates this. You’ve seen this throughout your career: a company acquiring another only to shut it all down a few years later when it didn’t prove successful or an organization moving into new market that doesn’t make any sense for their business or brand, or one that spends lavishly into the latest hot technology only to never deploy it and write off the loss (think VR and blockchain).
Separating and honoring impacts, issues, and decision-drivers in each of these two areas isn’t enough, however. The sequence in which you review them makes the differ- ence between understanding your opportunities and missing then altogether.
Simply put, start with the market context and use that to drive your operation- al context. Your operational strategy should support your market strategy and not the other way around! Now, there is some other information you should consider when setting your operational priorities. Trends in technology, governance, the economy, society, and the environment are also worth considering, so there should be a place for these. The word “considering” is apt here: they are worth considering because they impact the context in which you operate, not because they’re cool.
Marketing vs. Sales
One of the biggest mistakes in business is conflating and/or combining the Marketing function or department with the Sales function or department. Because these are both focused externally, leaders traditionally mix them together. When they do, they almost always destroy Marketing in the service of Sales.
Healthy organisms both inhale and exhale. They cannot do one without the other. Like- wise, in healthy (and successful) organizations, Marketing is the inhale (what you learn from customers, competitors, trends, etc.) and Sales is the exhale (what you tell your customers, industry, competitors, etc.). They’re very different things.
When combined, and because it is so important (it generates revenue), Sales nearly always crowds—out Marketing, which simply becomes the messaging subset of Sales. It stops breathing in an understanding of customers, competitors, and industry in all but the most tactical, quantitative sense. Marketing is supposed to uncover important insights about the market and be on the lookout for coming change. Sales isn’t usually concerned with that. And, many salespeople, from managers on down, believe they can tell customers and markets what they want them to believe, in order to make those sales. This is hardly ever true.
To be sure, your Sales and Marketing teams need to be coordinating, along with every other high-level team in the company. But, if they’re combined and lead by one person, one is going to suffer and then the entire organization will suffer. Either it won’t be learning but it needs to from the market, or it won’t be effectively messaging around those learnings to the market.
Stakeholders
Likewise, there are other stakeholders besides the traditional ones (customers, competitors, and shareholders) to consider in your strategy because they impact your context—both internal and external. Traditionally, businesspeople only really cared about shareholders (because that’s who they considered themselves to be serving), competitors (because they had to, though many ignore them sometimes), and custom- ers (begrudgingly). While some companies are customer-driven, way too many are not. This is especially true of governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They may represent themselves as serving the citizenry or a specific popula- tion but either their plans make no attempt to actually understand these stakeholders or their actions ignore their realities. Even when organizations deeply care about customers, they often use techniques and tools that mask the most important under- standings.
Leaders—entrepreneurs in particular—are often fiercely independent people. The media loves to lionize them as lone-wolfs (which is a complete fiction). To most businesspeople, stakeholders are often seen as a nuisance and as people or institutions who have little influence on an organization. The reality, however, is much different. Stakeholders of all kinds can be a source of impediments and partnerships, a critical fulcrum for success or failure.
Any stakeholders can be partners—or adversaries. Where NGOs like industry watch- dogs or UN agencies are often seen as a thorn in the side of businesses, NGOs not only provide an important purpose for people and society, they are often unsung allies with shared business goals. However, they’re rarely addressed in business strategy, except haphazardly.
We’ll discuss this more in Chapter 5, but consider for a moment the partnerships Pata- gonia has with Breadfruit Institute, Rodale Institute, Washington State University and many more. While Patagonia isn’t in the business of regenerative agriculture and fishery restoration, its strategic priorities align with these and other initiatives. They wouldn’t be effective at starting and managing divisions to implement these operations but, by partnering with other stakeholders, they can accomplish similar goals and make their supply chains more efficient while simultaneously helping others).
Similarly, when Nike wanted to start using organic cotton in their apparel in the late 1990s, they quickly learned that there wasn’t enough organic cotton produced in the world to meet the needs of even one of their product lines. A less strategic company would have just decided against using organic cotton but Nike knew that they would need to take the initiative to seed the industry so that they could meet these goals even if it took a decade to create the supply. They had to make investments in farmers and commitments to order materials in order to build the capacity they needed.
Even Apple invests heavily in their manufacturing partners, investing in and buying the very machines used in their vendors’ factories in order to have those capabilities avail- able (often before their competitors). They aren’t content to wait until “the market” makes strategically significant capabilities available; they bring these capabilities into existence themselves, to the benefit of both stakeholders.
The opposite is also true; today, the most successful NGOs, charities, and other non- profits already know that “corporate” partners can be more strategic sources of success beyond merely sources of funding. The NAACP, a leading US civil rights organization dedicated to achieving racial equality and justice for African Americans and other mar- ginalized communities, partners with Google to fund, scale, and support its AfroAca- demic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics. This benefits their constituents as well as Google’s ability to better source from underrepresented groups when hiring, helping them meet their goals.
If it takes a village to raise a child, as an old African proverb suggests, it takes a com- munity to help an organization (of any type) succeed. Those companies who routinely see other organizations as adversaries or don’t bother looking beyond their own corporate borders often reduce their ability to succeed by alienating themselves from potential partners.
Lastly, where the term shareholder used to be the only outsider category that busi- nesspeople were taught to address, the term, stakeholder, has broadened the field of both responsibility and possibility.
A New Model for Strategy
There are a lot of moving parts to Strategy, and this is what can make it seem so daunt- ing. However, they’re actually easy to map and explain—hopefully this book does that well. Each step represents important opportunities to question the context around an organization, research if needed, and focus on the most likely opportunities. They’re all important steps but each doesn’t have to take days or weeks to perform.
The most important thing is to actually ask these questions, even if the answer is “this doesn’t apply at this time.” Fair enough. Not every organization needs to focus on every potential stakeholder or category. Not every trend will impact your business. What’s critical is asking the question in the first place, at the right time, and then moving on when you have a satisfactory answer. The worst thing you can do is never ask the question at all, whether because you don’t have the time or information,
or because it never occurred to you. I can assure you that others are asking these questions and your success will hinge on finding the most powerful levers you canpull that identify and leverage those forces toward your success.
Sequence
One of the problems our hypothetical startup above encountered stemmed from inde- pendently working on two interrelated (dependent) processes at the same time. Not only did they ignore some steps in the strategic process (such as customer research), having different people develop the SWOT analysis and Positioning Statement simulta- neously ensured that the results of each wouldn’t mesh. Go back and look at those two diagrams. How many things in one show up in the other? They might as well be for two different companies.
Great strategy requires the output of one step to be the input of the next. Reversing the order, ignoring steps, or practicing them simultaneously negates their value and creates untold (and usually unrecognized) contradictions in strategy.
However, by carefully addressing the right questions in the right order, the cumula- tive focus ensures that the conclusions of strategy are supported by each step (and the questions associated with each step) are internally validated and consistent, and that the resulting strategy has a greater chance of success. It also means that those working on strategy maximize the value and efficiency of their work since they don’t need to go back and reconcile divergent conclusions, reconsider prior information, and explain away contradictions.
I was taught this method by one of the greatest market strategists in Silicon Valley: Regis McKenna. In the early 1990s, I and my partners at vivid studios met with him every Saturday morning for weeks to codify his approach to strategy. Before this, I was always more than a little suspicious of “marketing.” Perhaps, you are, too. What
I learned was that there were specific, careful, and successful steps that could reduce the chaos of understanding an organization’s surrounding market and quickly focus on the best possible paths to success. He called this process CRUSH (simply, for “crush the competition”) and the model in this book was inspired by that approach.
What’s enough?
Sadly, there’s no light that illuminates when you’ve “done enough” strategy. There is no way for a template or a tool to signal when you’ve best answered the question. But I can assure you that not answering it at all is easy to spot. Some of the steps are mandatory. Some are optional (though still worth considering, if only for an hour or so). All represent opportunities to understand your customers, your market, and the world around you, as well as your opportunities.
Even without a big budget or a lot of time, moving through this model in the proper sequence will heighten your chances of success and enable you to see opportunities you’d otherwise miss. That’s about all we can hope for with Strategy.
Now, to be honest, templates aren’t necessarily bad in their own right. Even this new model could be printed and used as a template. What is a problem, however, is how they’re used—and when. Without the right context, the data in them isn’t relevant. Without the right sequence, it doesn’t usually match. Without the right answers (like decision-drivers), it’s just garbage and the old adage, “Garbage in, garbage out” applies. If you know what underpins the template, know when to use which part, and know what really needs to be recorded, templates can be quick organizers that help you get organized and speed you along.
There are so many templates and canvases these days. This has been an important progression in the past 20 years, yet none of them are adequate. Even this new model I’m sharing is likely inadequate—just (hopefully) less so. I’ve tried to correct many of the most common problems with previous models but there are likely some things I’ve missed, too. Think of this as the best model thus far but it may be supplanted by oth- ers—and/or by future evolutions of this one.
Oh yes, and evidence: even when you’re using templates, without evidence, your data is ungrounded, making your insights and decisions equally ungrounded. If you’re questioned on either, you won’t be able to defend your strategy.
Who needs to be involved?
Ideally, everyone who touches the company, its offerings, its customers, and its opera- tions should be involved with the strategic process at some point. However, it’s often not feasible for truly everyone in an organization to be involved (at least for larger organizations), and it cannot be everyone’s focus. However, it’s usually the case that way too few people are involved—one of the many reasons why strategy fails.
Some roles (and their involvement) are more important than others, and most only at key parts of the process. In the Market sequence, everyone who connects with custom- ers, competitors, and industry must have their concerns, data, and insight included. This means that customer service personnel, salespeople, support people of all kinds, even roles with no official connection to customers often lend important data to the understanding of customers and the market.
There is a famous story about online footware retailer Zappo’s that describes how the company flies job candidates to their headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada, for interviews. They have a company bus pick these prospects up from the airport. When they’re returned to the airport in the same manner, the company talks with the bus driver to get their insights as to how pleasant, interesting, or alternatively, abusive the person might have been. It’s not likely that, singlehandedly, the driver could torpedo an other- wise stellar candidate but it’s often the case that this data can influence the decision of whether they would make a valuable employee. Your organization likely has people in it who understand your customers, partners, competitors, etc. in ways not usually rec- ognized. Their input may be the difference between “business as usual” and recogniz- ing something your competitors haven’t noticed about your customers and market.
Likewise, there are people throughout the operations of an organization that aren’t usually consulted about how the business runs, what’s not working as well as it could, or how things could be improved. Why wouldn’t you want to surface these insights while making critical decisions about the organization’s future?
One of the strengths of this new model is that it helps remind you of connections
and issues you might otherwise forget (and that your peers have never been taught to consider). Largely, valuing so many disparate voices is a factor of culture (more on that in Chapter 8). If an organization is used to separating people, teams, and divisions into silos or fiefdoms, it’s not likely that suddenly asking people into the process is going to work well. Managers may be offended and feel undermined, and employees may feel like there’s a catch they can’t quite identify. You may need to lay some groundwork, culturally, well in advance of consulting people that have never-before been brought into the process (and you may need to reassure everyone, particularly managers, along the way that things will be better).
Change is terrifying to some people. Many organizations develop an immunity to it. And, most everything about strategy suggests change—or should, if it’s going to have any positive impact. This is because both the market and society are constantly chang- ing. Much of managing the strategic process is really about managing expectations and fears.
You’ll also need to leave some extra time to consult more people, including partners of all kinds. Everything described in the next chapter on customers (and researching them) also applies to consulting people internally.
It never hurts to poll those in your organization about the current strategy (or whatever they think it is). Can they effectively answer the questions “How do you define our current strategy?” and “How do you define your role regarding the current strategy?” Is there a current strategy or not? If there is one, is it understood by many? Has it ever been communicated effectively and, if so, to whom?
Strategy is the synthesis of understanding several overlapping contexts, the union of several different perspectives, and the synthesis of conversations about these. All of this requires complexity because ignoring it ignored important truths about your customers, markets, competitors, industry, stakeholders, etc. Your goal is to clarify all of these disparate elements so that you can see how, together, they form a path to greater success. This complexity is a feature, not a bug, though some in your organization may try to subvert the process by simplifying the inputs and insights.
The above introduction is from the book A Whole New Strategy, Everything You Need to Think and Act More Strategically by Nathan Shedroff
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