Sherpa Alliance

How much time, energy, attention, paperwork, systems and, above all else, discipline do we invest in the financial accounting of our businesses?  A lot.  And by comparison, how much do we invest in the “strategic accounting” of our business?  (The Financial Accounting vs "Strategic Accounting" of your Business) Or are we paying some degree of lip service to it instead?  In my experience, it’s a strategy tragedy, which could cause a kind of Eastern Airlines tragedy (see:  Divergence and Convergence) with your business.

Many leading edge researchers and authors say the same thing:

“Maybe you’ve sat through one of more strategy reviews like this one:  The participants gather.  The planners bring out the big, fat book they’ve assembled and go through it page by page in show-and-tell mode, allowing little room for questions.  The CEO will ask a few, to be sure.  Often he’s been prepped by the planning staff so that he can show he has a grasp of the subject (and maybe nail a few people with “gotchas”).  People struggle to stay awake through the deadly ritual.  At the end of four hours, there’s been little or no constructive discussion, and almost no decisions about which actions will advance the business.  In fact, nobody really understands much of what they’ve heard – the critical issues don’t stand out amid all the mind-numbing detail.  People will take the books back to their offices, where they will end up as credenza-ware, gathering dust for the rest of the year”  (Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan, Execution, 2002).

“Too often, leaders of organizations choose one of two extremes when it comes to planning:
•     They have no real long-range plan and make decisions reactively according to their short-term needs, or …
•     They have a detailed and analytically elegant  3 to 5 year strategic plan, which is designed to eventually roll into a grand, all-consuming long term goal.
Successful organizations achieve a delicate balance between predicting what is going to happen over the long term and responding to unexpected circumstances along the way.  This calls for a planning approach that provides the right amount of context without unnecessary restrictions." (Patrick Lencioni, Silo’s, Politics and Turf Wars, 2006)

“To thrive in an increasingly disruptive world, companies must become as strategically adaptable as they are operationally efficient.   Expecting them to be strategically nimble, restlessly innovative, or highly engaging places to work – or anything else than merely efficient – is like expecting a dog to do the tango.  Their managerial DNA makes some things easy and others virtually impossible.  Modern management isn’t just a suite of tools and techniques;  it is a paradigm.  We are all prisoners of our paradigms.  Management breakthroughs require intellectual long jumps;  a mental revolution.  There’s not much in the average MBA curriculum, management best seller, or leadership development program that would suggest there are radical alternatives to the way we lead, plan, organize, motivate, and manage right now. But true innovators are never bound by what is; instead they dream of what could be.  Hence the goal of this book:  to help you and your colleagues first imagine, and then invent, the future of management”.  (Gary Hamel, The Future of Management, 2007).

As Gary Hamel suggests, learning the tango of strategic adaptability and operational efficiency doesn’t happen by accident – its often not in our DNA because of a lack of reinforcement from business schools, books or training, or our experience of most businesses we work in as suggested by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan and Patrick Lencioni.  It starts with the intellectual long jumps and mental revolutions of paradigm shifts from which flow new tools and techniques.

That’s what our work is about.  Helping you avoid strategy tragedy, with a new paradigm concept-suite, model-set and tool-box which reflects the integrated anatomy and DNA of your journey challenge, helping you develop your organizational agility.  Travel well.