Strategy - an introduction

I appreciate the work of Charles Reid and Alvaro Castagnet, two contemporary artists who could not be more different.
Charles Reid creates careful drawings and uses clean soft colours expertly and deftly laid down to produce gentle, powerful paintings. Anything but a slave to convention, he says, “Composition was invented by people who had nothing better to do with their time”.

Both of these images come from the photos shown by Jamie Williams Grossman who attended one of Charles Reid’s workshops. These are shown at: Http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=540244

Alvaro Castagnet creates expressive paintings with wild abandon, painting darks over darks in an explosive chaos out of which breath-taking art emerges.

This image comes from Pintrest: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/407786941231192033/

“If you are in control of your painting” he says “you are not going fast enough”.

The image comes from http://www.ajanstabloid.com/haber.aspx?pid=91

These two artists represent just a tiny slice of the breadth of art technique, in a single medium, watercolour. Now I wonder about the source of their brilliance. What mechanics, what model can be used to encapsulate their inspiration? What mechanism could be invoked to copy their creative process? Or have years of practice allowed them to take off on creative flights that cannot be contained in a model? C. Otto Scharmer talks about three perspectives on the work of the artist: The finished work, the process of painting or the internal process of the artist as they stand before a blank sheet. This third process is the least understood.

Which brings us to the question of strategy.

There seems to be no simple, in-a-box, definition for strategy, accepted in both academic circles and among practitioners. This grievous lack of an obvious answer lead to the comment in The Economist “Nobody really knows what strategy is.” (Economist March, 20 1993). In a well-supported quote, Gary Hamel called the lack of a theory of strategy creation the “dirty little secret of the strategy industry”.

I just wonder if the search for a theory is not the point. Perhaps trying to pin down the exact process of strategy is like trying to find the mechanism behind a great painting. Analysing the mechanism does not guarantee that you or the person reading your work will be a great creator. The “teacher” in Ecclesiastes, says this is like ‘trying to shepherd the wind’.

What is the mechanism behind the genius of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, JMW Turner, Cezanne, Picasso or even people like Michael Mentler or Fred Hatt ? Have all the years of study produced a reproducible model? What is their ‘dirty little secret’? Or is this a profound topic that cannot be rattled off in a two by two matrix?

Henry Mintzberg and his co-authors have published possibly the most comprehensive categorisation of strategy. He and two associates describe 10 schools of strategy which can be summarised in 5 approaches.

So is the process logical or creative, deliberate or emergent, revolutionary or evolutionary. And should it focus on the market or on the company’s resources, responsiveness or synergy or competition or cooperation? And should it be creative and entrepreneurial, based on formal, systematic and comprehensive planning or based on effective responses to unexpected opportunities and problems. Or do all of the above form part of the journey, applied as appropriate? Whatever you decide, your strategy must:

Create competitive advantage: Where your chosen customers choose to buy from you instead of from your competitors, increasing your potential to earn a persistently higher rate of profit. This advantage could come from specific resources and capabilities, or an unassailable or at least discouragingly superior market position.
Make you different: Either through a unique capability, a distinct market position, favourable laws or regulations or your capacity to innovate or adapt more quickly.
Focus on choices: “The most common source of strategic failure is the failure to make clear and explicit choices.” With limited talent, time and money you are required to decide on which positions to occupy as well as how well the resources and chosen processes fit together. Therefore there are opportunities and positions you will choose to ignore. Some opportunities will be inconsistent with your brand, the configuration of your offer or your organisational priorities (in trying to be all things to all customers, you risk confusing your customers and staff).
Fit together: Your strategy and the choices you make need to fit, both internally, in mutually reinforcing systems and externally, appropriate to the environment in which you operate.
Prepare you for a changing market place: The future will always be uncertain, even with the benefit of wide ranging futures research. The organisations which will prevail are those who are light enough on their feet to learn and change, or massive enough to batten down the hatches perhaps.
Be a rallying point for all of your people: When all the dust has settled around your strategy and your plan you will be depending on the imagination and motivation of the people in your organisation to make it happen
Allow you to make a difference: What is the difference you make that counts to your market?
Be executed: Abraham Lincoln once lamented that his Generals thought they could win the civil war simply by clever strategy and they had yet to learn that victory would require bloody battles. There is a discipline required to pushing towards strategic goals on a daily, weekly and monthly basis while completing the everyday processes of the business of your organisation.

Kaplan and Norton have said they are agnostic about how you create your strategy, but the best way to plan it is through the medium of a strategy map. And Steven Covey defined a process of four components for executing strategy.