Don’t Fear the Process

I was at a company where the core competencies were the highest I’ve ever seen. In three seconds, we could strategize where to sit in a meeting to make it more productive. We could layout a trade booth to maximize traffic flow and product exposure, leaving room for fun and improvization. We knew where we stood in the market and against our past performance on a minute-by-minute basis. We ate the low-hanging fruit for breakfast, and shot down our competition at lunch. We were good.

This day there was an executive strategy meeting — like we needed one. As you might guess, there was a new guy in charge, and HE needed one. My usual Pollyanna attitude didn’t have room for this interruption. There was real work that needed to get done. I resented this pretend work that was getting in the way.

“If he asks us to spell strategy, I’m out of there,” I said to another VP on the way in. It was worse than I thought. He flipped a chart and started talking about SWOT — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats — which, by the way, is analysis not strategy. We needed that even less. [Read more…]