Complexity
is the Enemy
of Strategy
Ever found yourself wondering why
business strategies consistently
fail to deliver? Roger Martin,
Criticaleye Thought Leader and
Dean of the Rotman School of
Management, tells Criticaleye where
the improvements need to be made
Where does conventional strategy tend to
fall short?
What needs to be the starting point when
devising a strategy?
Companies usually don’t have a really good
definition of strategy for managers to strive
towards. Strategy is confused with planning or
merely becomes a budget with words – this is
not particularly helpful.
It has to be fun, effective and relatively
simple. There is no reason why it shouldn’t
be but for most companies, it’s not. As a
CEO, you should devise simple questions
that make sense logically and let you think
through the problems. That is what strategy
is rather than just having concepts­– have a
thinking, workable framework for actually
executing strategy.
How can CEOs navigate the complexity of
running an organisation across multiple
countries?
A good strategy helps you make sense of
an overflow of information and data. If you
don’t have a good strategy, it becomes hard
to distinguish between information that is
interesting, helpful and important and that
which is either distracting or actually harmful
to the decision-making process.
Given the pace of change and different
priorities within a global marketplace,
how do you keep your strategy current and
relevant?
Strategy is about shortening your odds, not
perfection. Nobody can know the future and
nobody can be perfect which means there
must be a certain amount of flexibility when
devising strategy. However, those in charge
will often observe and analyse, wanting to get
it absolutely perfect when in fact strategists
wanting to get it absolutely right are deluding
themselves.
Does this make it easier to respond to both
threats and opportunities?
The use of emergent strategies needs to
be re-evaluated. It’s certainly become a
popular approach with technology firms
and start-ups which face a rapidly changing
marketplace. It’s about adapting to the
world as it changes and being emergent as
the world changes. If you don’t monitor...
hone, update and modify your decisions as
you go along you probably won’t survive.
There is a huge amount of complexity to
be sifted through, from economic volatility
to changing consumer behaviour and new
routes to market. At present, I would say
only a minority of companies and their
leadership teams have a clear enough
definition of strategy to, on a consistent
basis, be able to use and update it and
modify decisions accordingly in order to
drive a successful business.
So clarity is the key?
Too often, CEOs in particular will allow what is
urgent to crowd out what is really important.
Strategy is a choice. More specifically, it’s
an integrated set of choices that uniquely
positions a company in its industry so as to
create sustainable advantage and superior
value relative to the competition.
© Criticaleye 2013
Roger Martin
Dean
Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto, Canada
Roger is a leading business strategist,
author and Dean of the Rotman School of
Management at the University of Toronto. He is
an advisor to Procter & Gamble, Steelcase and
several other companies on design and strategy.
Contact Roger through www.criticaleye.net
Playing to Win – How
Strategy Really Works
by Roger Martin and
A. G. Lafley, the former
CEO of Procter &
Gamble, has recently
been published by the
Harvard Business Press.
www.criticaleye.net 1