Month / August 2008

by Roger Dennis

Bringing Strategy to Life

Strategy.

The word means so many thing to so many people, but I prefer a simple definition provided by my friend and colleague Patrick Harris of thoughtengine. He crystalised the meaning of the word as “the plan that gets you from where you are now to where you want to be in the future.”

It’s simple but not simplistic.

I use this definition to guide my work in the area of strategic innovation.  Often though there’s a need to make your strategy more than just a pile of black and white A4 documents.  And, before you make the obvious retort, I’m also talking  about those strategy documents that use colour.  And, what’s more, those that use  – gasp – graphs.

The challenge is to make a strategy come to life so that people can not just understand it, but experience it.  At the end of last week I ran a process to do just that – bring the Board of a NZ$1.3billion organisation up to date on the strategy.

Working with my colleagues we developed a concept where we mocked up an example of what the current service was like.  We had real people talking to small groups from the Board about how things were done today and what the problems were with the service.

We then walked them through the strategy, but bought it to life.  We mapped out the next twelve years from a customer point of view, and from an employee point of view.  We used three points along the way (the years 2011, 2014 and 2017)  to show how things could change and why they needed to change.  By interacting with two scenarios, the Board were able to see what would happen if the organisation continued on it’s present path, and what would happen if the organisation was transformed.

At the end of the walk though we then had a mockup of what the service might look like in the year 2020, and why the mockup was a better outcome for the organisation, for the employees and for the customer.

The result was exactly what we had hoped for: a Board that was galvanised by the challenges that it faced.  The Board not only understood the issues, but also had an excellent grasp of the complexities that were inherent in the strategy.

Now that’s something that you can’t do with paper.

by Roger Dennis

The importance of strategy in downturns

A quick post to point to a thought provoking article on the Booz site. The summary excerpt is as follows:


All industrial corporations face downturns and periods of retrenchment. Successful strategists promote upturn thinking even during the deepest downturns. Techniques such as crafting an upturn SWAT team, implementing long-term strategic planning, and requiring upturn thinking during restructuring help companies develop their own Marshall Plan to stay one step ahead of competitors when better times return.

by Roger Dennis

A Chinese recession and the World Economy

Although I’ve been looking around recently, there’s hardly any discussion about the scenario that China’s economy could nose dive.  The prospect would be interesting to say the least, and would have a dramatic effect on the world economy.  However yesterday The Independent published a piece looking at the possibility of China slowing down post-Olympics.  The most riveting statement was this:

The basic point is that Chinese consumers have taken over from those in the US as the main drivers of additional demand in the world economy. […] All eyes will be on China over the next month. It will be the first time for most of us in the West that we will have to contemplate a world where China takes over from the US as the largest economy. That tipping point is probably still 25 years away, but long before that the shift of power will shape our perception of global economics.