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Geoff
Ball & Associates Enabling People to Work Together BETTER Geoff Ball & Associates, 315 Bryant Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301 Cell Phone 650-279-9461, ghball@aol.com |
An Approach to Strategy |
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Geoff Ball, Geoff Ball & Associates
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“ My message is that successful business strategies result not from rigorous analysis but from a particular state of mind. In what I call the mind of the strategist, insight and a consequent drive for achievement, often amounting to a sense of mission, fuel a thought process which is basically creative and intuitive rather than rational. Strategists do not reject analysis. Indeed they can hardly do without it. But they use it only to stimulate the creative process, to test the ideas that emerge, to work out their strategic implications, or to ensure successful execution of high potential ‘wild’ ideas that might otherwise never be implemented properly. Great strategies, like great works of art or great scientific discoveries, call for technical mastery in the working out but originate in insights that are beyond the reach of conscious analysis.” – Kenichi Ohmae in the Mind of the Strategist. |
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Strategy can be viewed as choice making regarding the
allocation of resources to move toward a desired goal or purpose, toward
what we are seeking to create in the world. Strategy is the approach
we choose to take to manage the tensions among our intent, customer
/ client, context, competition, resources and capability. In simplest terms we need to state our intent, review our capabilities, look
at our resources, consider what is going on in the environment, decide on the
goods and/or services we are providing our customer or client, look at the
other options available to that customer, and find a way to maintain a pool
of resources. What complicates strategy work is the richness of the environment, the complexity
of the organization, the many options available to the customer and the uncertainty
of key factors going forward into the future. We need an explicit agreed upon strategy to enable us to manage the following dilemmas: |
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-- Alignment AND empowerment |
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| Working on strategy gives us the opportunity to step back and dialog about unresolved conflicts that impede the effectiveness of the organization, about assumptions and their implications, uncertainties and risks, and connections between the parts. It would be easier if work on Strategy were linear and simple. It is neither. And yet much of the information needed is known by those in the organization and available to it. | ||
The complexity of the information can, however, be overwhelming. The work needs to enable connection among all elements, action in the face of uncertainty, enhance communication, clarify choices, and achieve sufficient congruence among the elements. The work of the consultant for strategy is to work with those in the organization -- gathering, organizing, linking, representing and encouraging. Effective strategy work spends lots of time in the ‘groan’ zone' where fear that we will never bring it back together lives. Effective strategy work is iterative – it approximates intent, tests it against the other elements, modifies it, creates strategic approaches, revisits intent until intent, capability, the competition, the environment and the customer are all imaginatively re-integrated. |
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