Your Strategic Plans Probably Aren't Strategic, or Even Plans (hbr.org)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Unfortunately, while C-suite executives talk "strategy," they're often confused about what it means. Why this confusion? The problem starts with the word itself -- a scarily misunderstood concept in management and board circles. The most basic mix-up is between "objective," "strategy," and "action." (I see this frequently in published strategic plans as well.) Grasp this, I tell my audience, and your day will be well spent.

An "objective" is something you're trying to achieve -- a marker of the success of the organization. At the other end of the spectrum is "action." This occurs at the individual level -- a level that managers are presented with day after day. So naturally when they think "strategy" they focus on what they do. But this isn't strategy either. "Strategy" takes place between these two at the organization level and managers can't "feel" that in the same way. It's abstract. CEOs have an advantage here because only they have a total view of the organization.

The key to strategy is that it's the positioning of one business against others -- such GM against Ford and Toyota, for example. What exactly is positioning? It's placement on the strategic factors relevant to each key stakeholder group.

Comments

Summary: Managers use buzzwords

[MobyDisk]

TLDR: Mid-level managers use the word "strategy" to mean BS things that are not strategies. If you groan when you hear the word "leverage" and "synergize" then you aren't one of those people, and there is nothing new in the article.

I found the article confusing because it is clearly aimed at people who can't tell buzzwords from reality. I didn't understand how anyone could use the word "strategy" to mean anything else. It wasn't until I saw the examples and realized "ohhh... THOOOSE kinds of people."

C-class aren't employees

[rsilvergun]

with very few exceptions. They're the ruling class. That's why corporations have all sorts of legal protections you and I don't have (you don't spill the blood of kings) and why they're never punished for their mistakes (if you're gonna hit the king you better kill the king).

America and all the rest of the world has a strong class divide as well as various caste systems used to divide the working class into manageable chunks that can be rules. Once you realize this everything else makes sense.