Strategy Skills: Techniques to Sharpen the Mind of the Strategist

By Dr. Matthew Checkley

The new, punchy and provocative text from award winning strategist Dr. Matthew Checkley. This book will change the way you view strategy and how you address the challenges of organizational transformation. More than anything, it will re-energize your journey towards both your and your organization's success. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr. Matthew Checkley
• Release date: Mar 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393091196

Book preview

Preface

This book started as a search for a better way to strategize. I was exploring models, techniques and theories but found that they looked quite different from the work of talented strategists. I needed smarter ways to think about strategy.

We are all strategists in some ways. Career, organizations and involvement in politics all call on these skills. The issues can be overwhelming. Yet a few people seem to have grasped something that helps them to navigate, full power, towards success. With this in mind, the ideas within are written for people facing many kinds of strategic challenge; not just corporate managers, but also entrepreneurs, activists, policymakers and the strategically-ambitious. This book is dedicated to using research, blended with experience, to help the practice of strategy. It is about understanding and shaping where we - or our organizations - are, where (or what) we want to be, and how we are going to get there.

I have been researching strategic management, risk and social networks for over twenty years. I have also been lucky enough to have trained or collaborated with more than 1000 entrepreneurs and 100 corporations in business planning and strategy. Meeting so many businesses gave a sense of their high enthusiasm for the topic and what they wanted to understand.

So why do clever, capable managers eschew the basics of strategic management? What do they do instead? Why are established ideas of questionable worth? And if the foundations of strategy are in error, what is the alternative? Can strategy be understood in a way that is both descriptively accurate (i.e. rigorous), and prescriptive (i.e. useful); that helps you determine what you should do?

One answer is that strategy is a product of the mind. The focal strategic task is maximizing your strategic intelligence; the power of the individual or collective (organizational) mind. You will encounter ways to increase these abilities. In addition, the mind can be attuned to Deep Games; dynamic, partly unpredictable, co-dependencies between players, requiring skilled navigation. The game is best played on a flexible, semi-stable, middle ground blending of messy, practical, immediate context, and rigid, abstract, detached theory and models (see Exhibit 0.1). This idea of semi-stability and its link to intelligence is the core theme throughout. The mingling of practical-and-experiential with formal-and-abstract is also reflected in the styles of the chapters.

Exhibit 0.1 Themes of the Book

Most of the arguments come from the huge and growing literature on strategic management, which itself owes a lot to other subjects, such as warfare studies and economics. But ideas from further disciplines are interwoven; particularly cognitive science and the recently developed realm of situated cognition. The spotlight is more on exploring the implications of this way of thinking than on defending it. Only modest prior knowledge of strategy is assumed from the reader.

The chapters are punchy (just a few pages each), graphic, and written in the belief that the best hope for a book on strategy is that it fuels action and debate. Brevity helps. If you want full descriptions of strategy models and techniques, there are thousands of free websites instantly available and around fifty weighty textbooks on strategic management. The emphasis in this text is on unsettling existing views to create useful questions and a few proposals. Your strategy is a product of your mind.

The story is told in three sections. In the first, I outline the history of strategy and some basic ideas. Then, second, I criticize the time-honored understanding of strategy. In the third section, I take a more progressive view and Deep Games and their applications are addressed. A Glossary at the back helps with the few technical terms. The emphasis throughout is business strategy, but many of the ideas work with many kinds of strategic challenge.

Acknowledgments

Many people have contributed superb critiques, suggestions and support: Henk Alles; Tom Blount; Lee Butcher; Bruce Clements; Richard Endersby; Fernanda Galindo; Bahar Ali Kazmi; Stewart McGill; Mary McKenna; Aleks Melli; Daniel Santamaria and Mark A. Smith. The philosophical heart of the book comes from Brian Cantwell Smith’s, On the Origin of Objects. Any errors remain my responsibility.

Section One – Beginnings

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We begin with foundational ideas. This section considers the origins of strategy and the strengths of the pre-eminent theory of strategic management. The book progresses, in Section Two, to take a more critical view.

Chapter 1: Understood Backwards

Ideas run in trammels worn by history. Seeing where they have come from helps to understand where they are going and what, by taking their course, was missed along the way. To this end, much ink has been spilt on the origins of strategic management.

The story runs that the formal study of strategy began with military thinkers at least two millennia ago. Its development into strategic management followed the invention of the modern corporation in 20th Century America¹. An increasingly theoretically-grounded blend of case studies, economics, sociology, psychology, and – in the last three decades - rich pluralism, have speared studies of what makes for successful strategy (content research) and what makes for successful strategizing (process research)². A fixation with rationalist economics is understandable to the extent that successful usually means profitable and economics is, arguably, the sharpest knife by which to dissect profitability (although it says much less about how to nurture profitability). Yet there is among researchers no consensus on one central theory of strategic management (the Resource Based View gets closest; see the next Chapter) and a broad impatience with what we have.

Taking a longer view back in time; Homo sapiens appeared around 135,000³ years ago and produced ever-more sophisticated and diverse tools and techniques. No one knows quite when, but around this time language emerged. Around 35,000 years ago we see the first evidence of exchange between widespread groups of these early humans; non-local materials being used for ornamentation and tools, discernible trade routes⁴. There is evidence of division of labor, specialization, and trade with non-local, non-relatives. Some researchers reckon that it was this ability to specialize and trade diversely that gave Homo sapiens the vital edge in competition with the Homo neanderthalensis. Trade and strategy are not the same things, of course, but it is hard to imagine that all these thousands of years of increasing coordination did not accompany activities that now we would recognize as strategic.

The word strategy has military origins and the war-like approach keeps creeping up. The language of strategy texts and strategists is evidence enough; the need for a war chest to out-maneuver rivals and so dominate a region. And it is hard to find a student of strategy who does not think that bigger is better in competition. The view of size-as-power has resonance for opposing armies able to inflict roughly equal kill-rates. The picture for business strategy is more complex; optimal size could be, in fact, relatively small. And some argue that the future of the ecommerce will be using technologies to match supply to demand in a way that both restrains direct rivalry and that increases the overall efficiency and utility of outcomes. Despite all this, martial thinking runs deep in organizational strategy.

This is a pity. For every hostile rivalry between organizations you might have hundreds or even thousands of cooperative relationships. There is evidence that humans are profoundly pre-disposed to cooperation. Experiments show that a reflexive desire to help and cooperate – evidenced in children – is basic to human-unique cognition⁵. The conventional warlike mindset is not just out-of-step with research on what works strategically, it also runs counter to deeper elements of human nature.

Recommended Reading

For a highly readable review of most of the major theories of strategic management, it is hard to beat, "Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour