Today's post comes from my friend and collaborator Richard Wilding. Richard is the founder and owner of WMW, a creative agency which likes to pick fights with complexity at work. He's just written the UK Government's narrative for tech founders to set up, scale up and stay in the UK.

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I’ve found that “strategy” is the most mis-understood term as well as the most over-used and time-wasting practice in all of businessdom. Bookauthority.org lists its 100 best strategy books of all time. I’m going to guess that there are thousands of others. The number betrays not a clarity on what strategy is but a muddle. A muddle of strategists. I had a client a while back, a very large bank (well, all banks are very large) and one year they asked us to help them write 23 separate strategies. They wouldn’t countenance my suggestion that maybe ask themselves why they were writing so many strategies. 

I started out believing in the myth of strategy. It sounded intellectual, what smart people did, people way smarter than me. It was a language I had to learn if I was Going To Get On. 

Then I went to a company conference for a client I was working with at the time, PepsiCo, and I heard the CEO tell the audience that strategy never sold a single can of Pepsi. What sold cans of Pepsi and packets of crisps (or chips, if you’re in the US and you also believe that football is called soccer) was the execution of the strategy. 

I thought about that for a while and watched what happened with strategy and its execution. And what I saw was that in executing strategy, strategy melts away like the ice in a G&T when it enters the oven of the real world. A period of time later (a quarter, a year, whatever) the ELT can turn around and congratulate themselves on how successful their strategy was when in fact the strategy had had nothing to do with the actual success. What makes strategy successful is abandoning it in favour of what works. 

How I see it — which helps me and I hope will help you — is like this: 

You have an objective, you have a strategy, and then you have what happens. 

You start with an objective. Let’s say, my objective is to write a helpful book about the problems experienced by founders. 

A strategy is a short piece of disciplined thinking (in my case, hand-written on a single sheet of paper) that helps me get from where I am now – no book (A) – to where I want to get to – a published book (B). What are the shortest number of steps I need to take to get from (A) to (B)?

My strategy is to i) interrogate my experience and that of my clients and contacts, ii) pop it down in a more or less ordered way, with a beginning, middle and end and an eye-catching title and iii) rely on my great writing ability plus some smart marketing to watch sales rise. There is no doubt how hard I’ll work to execute this strategy.

Then there’s what happens. And what happens is that once I get going, I find that the real world makes a mockery of my strategy and pretty much tears it to pieces. The real world is an editor. The editor takes a look at what I produce, shrugs her shoulders and says, ‘Seen it before a hundred times. Come back when you can show me what I haven’t seen even once.’ So I go away.

What happens when I go away? I figure out that most businesses go bust inside two years. Two years is 104 weeks. Wouldn’t it be cool do write 104 tips on how not to go bust, one per week.

I end up with something way better than anything I’d have ended up with had I stuck with my strategy. 

What the real world didn’t change was my objective. 

Objectives dwarf strategies.  

The real world dwarves everything. It can even change your objectives, but that’s for another day.

Beware anyone suggesting that you invest a heavy amount of your severely limited time in doing Strategy. A strategy is the first step which gets you out of the door. It’s a first step, which is important, but nowhere close to the most important steps. 

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