1. Strategy and Value Exchange: Strategy as New Year’s Resolutions
If you just want what you don’t have, you’ll get what you don’t want.
New Year’s resolutions rarely come true.
But it’s not because we’re lazy.
It’s not because our planning is bad.
These resolutions are lists of things we don’t have now but want to have in the future.
And we often forget that if we don’t have it today, it is for a reason.
There is a reason why we don’t exercise, work too much, and read too little.
No matter how bold our list is, our wishes won’t come true until we address this reason.
Your business strategy also shouldn’t be a list of New Year’s resolutions.
There are no unsolvable tasks. There is poor resource planning and ineffective teamwork.
Your strategic dreams won’t come true on their own.
You need to know:
– What assets you need to create or develop
– What processes you have to change
2. Strategy-related terms: Don’t bottleneck your strategic thinking
Don’t just remove what hinders you, create what drives you.
Many portray strategy as steps to clear obstacles between you and your bold aspirations.
In other words, to ‘bust the bottleneck.’
The authors of this concept interpret a bottleneck broadly as anything that hinders one from achieving one’s goals.
But executives often take it too narrowly, as something that must be removed.
If you replace ‘busting the bottleneck’ with ‘creating the conditions,’ things will work better.
What conditions do you need to create to achieve your goals?
3. Trend of the week: When Good Fights Evil, Money Always Wins
A decade ago, Netflix unveiled a generous parental leave benefit. It promised to give new moms and dads unlimited time off in their child’s first year.
It was a promise Netflix couldn’t keep.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
“The policy was in line with a core company value, “freedom and responsibility,” the idea that employees can be trusted to set their own boundaries. But more staffers than expected took full advantage of the benefit, and Netflix ultimately found it unsustainable.”
Netflix’s culture of employee freedom, unusual for most businesses, has become legendary. But it seems to be coming to an end now.
“…Netflix is revisiting those long-held mantras, worrying they’re no longer practical for a company that has some 14,000 employees… It has also shifted its focus to profitability, under pressure from Wall Street, instead of subscriber growth.”
Granting too much freedom to employees in a large company inevitably leads to abuse.
Sad but true: you can’t manage a large company like a startup.
We see that the world isn’t becoming more like Zappos; instead, Zappos is becoming more like the rest of the world.
Does your strategy account for tectonic shifts in corporate culture as the company grows?
Have you considered in your strategy that managing a large company requires a fundamentally different approach than managing a small one?
Svyatoslav Biryulin
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