ZOOZ Consulting | Strategy in the Manager’s Toolkit

Developing a strategic plan is perceived as a one-off task that management then needs to find a way to make it happen. This is where failure lurks. The management profession cannot settle for realizing a strategy. Management is about developing the strategic perspective at all levels, all the time. There is no work in stages here. There is one nature: integrating current and future materials, a perception of the current reality, a perception of the reality to which you aspire, and bridging the gap between them. This article teaches how to turn strategy into everyday work.

A. Introduction

The management profession has been accepted as a legitimate profession in recent decades. The strategic outlook has gained a lot of momentum. However, it is still standard to separate between management (ongoing) and the strategic aspect. Many organizations experience the strategic aspect as a one-off event followed by the implementation of the strategy. It sounds familiar, but it is alienated from the organization’s true being. In this article, we will attempt to examine the recent developments in the strategy management sphere as they manifest in the latest publications. We will attempt to present an organized agenda for a manager whose time is not in his own hands. At the end of the article, we will offer a list of recommended literature for managers that want to delve a little deeper. This will be a selection of publications from various disciplines that stress the importance of changing the approach and way of thinking in the various management disciplines.

Management’s goal is to create ongoing value for the organization. Increasing the wealth. This can be compared to a chef serving tomato soup: he enriches the soup with a pinch of ground cardamom, two tablespoons of good quality olive oil and… a splash of Arak. The chef made his customers happy and his business richer. Every business is based on a happy customer. A happy customer brings more customers. This is what creating ongoing value is all about. How can the manager enrich his business? By being creative in his manner of presentation to the customer. How will the manager ensure that all the employees experience this creativity everywhere and all the time? By creating an open atmosphere and willingness to change. This is where the art of management enters the picture.

Our problem is that we are swamped by management theories that make up the management toolkit. This toolkit comprises the core of contemporary management. This is both a pro and con. This collection of perspectives that are improperly integrated. Therefore, modern management requires the highest level of intellect that enables integration of the management materials. Numerous studies written about management in recent years attempt to offer the “magic formula”. The management sphere has been researched from two perspectives: 1. Studying companies that have “made it”: what succeeded, what failed, and attempting to generalize. Basically: Go to the best and try and mimic their technique. 2. Developing cause-effect theories. A good example is Newton’s theory of Universal Gravitation: Let go of an object and you can imagine its path and effect on the immediate surroundings. The same goes for management, Type A management may (at a reasonable level of probability) set in motion process B that will yield outcome C.

That’s it for management. Now, what about strategy? Developing a strategic plan is perceived as a one-off task that management then needs to find a way to make it happen. This is where failure lurks. The management profession cannot settle for realizing a strategy. Management is about developing the strategic perspective at all levels, all the time. There is no work in stages here. There is one nature: integrating current and future materials, a perception of the current reality, a perception of the reality to which you aspire, and bridging the gap between them in complete partnership.

B. What Type of Management?

“Management experts” are not really appropriate here, and neither is a “charismatic leader” that pulls the organization after him.
Management experts: The manager cannot settle for a “shift supervisor” type of management. He must develop intelligent understanding and dialogue capability with all of the organization’s spheres. Experts are usually capable of delving into details. This is both their forte and downfall: Engaging in issues that do not have any real potential of creating ongoing value for the organization. The chef serving the tomato soup will understand why and how the tomatoes must be peeled and the seeds removed. However, the manager needs to help find the additives that will make the difference: like good quality olive oil, freshly ground cardamom seeds… and a splash of Arak. This is how you create differentiation from the competition.

The charismatic manager: The media bombards us with examples of managers that have “made it”: The ones that have led their organization to a breakthrough. They have no partners…. Ah, sorry, they will always say that “none of this could have been possible without my people…”. Really, no one actually believes it. None of it would have happened without him. In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins discusses this phenomenon in detail. The media is not to blame here either. It simply gives legitimacy to the development of a species of managers that take their brand to the next level.

And what about the organization? What about creating ongoing value? The answer lies in developing a species of managers equipped with an assortment of unconventional characteristics: high intellect, integrity, and… uncompromising humility. This is an essential condition to creating ongoing value for the organization. This is how an open organizational culture is built, which enables the organization to actualize all of its resources, primarily its human resources. Such a culture encourages personal development and growth that influences the ability to create the required value.

C. And What Type of Strategy?

The evolution of strategic perspectives in recent decades was brilliantly reviewed in Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel’s book, Strategy Safari. Highly recommended. The review combines the various perspectives and the background for their development. The toolkit’s failure is evident here as well. Reality can be examined using tools, but unfortunately, the consultation methodology of companies engaged in the field match theories to another reality: one constructed in the minds of the consultants.

The failure stems from how the strategic consultant profession works: concocting a book that will benefit the shelf and nothing else. This can often be compared to a first year Psychology student that can interpret people’s behavior according to the material he studied. This student has not yet internalized the material. When he does, his explanations will become intuitive and he won’t need to ascribe them to personality theory A or B.

The solution lies in assisting the manager on an ongoing basis so that he will learn and develop the ability to use the various perspectives without needing to remember the name of the theory. Mintzberg claims that strategies are born and formed during the magical moments of peace: on a night flight or just during a quiet moment. Obviously a manager with a crazy schedule will find this much more difficult to achieve.

The solution, then, lies in Sisyphean learning of the discipline and the various strategic perspectives. No consulting firm can replace a manager equipped with quality time for learning. How can a manager achieve quality time when reality imposes other dynamics? Good question. We will discuss this later.

D. What is the Relationship between Time Management and Strategy?

Every so often, the company is required to come up with a strategic plan. The off-the-shelf solution is to hire a consulting company. The easy and perverse way: a few meetings at the company, some customers, some suppliers, lots of hours online, describe the findings using the leading jargon, and package it in an intelligent-sounding strategic theory. The benefit to the company is left, for the most part, on the CEO’s bookshelf. In order to implement the results of the study, more work and money are required.

What do you do when intelligent and skilled people also find it difficult to internalize information about a new subject? This is akin to a farmer planting a seed in arid land. The seed has no chance of growing. Likewise, there is no chance that a strategic expert will gain new insights after internet learning. So what can we do?

Most of the information is already in the company. The problem stems from the work method most companies use, which encourages isolated islands of knowledge without any real sharing. This is intensified as a result of management methods that advocate irrelevant measurement. What do we really want to achieve with strategic planning? We want to nurture two components that will feed two processes:

The way consulting firms handle the strategic plan resembles planting a seed in a bucket of water: the root volume is limited. Under reasonable conditions, the seed will grow into a beautiful plant, but without an actual connection to the organization. The infrastructure for the plant is isolated. There is no connection to the rest of the knowledge in the organization.

Only a systemic action of planting, fertilizing, and irrigation can fulfill an organization’s potential. This is how various capabilities and information found in different segments of the organization are connected to building an intra-organizational reality. This is done by developing an entrepreneurial and open organizational culture. An example of this can be seen in the process described below.

Another problem: How to create quality management time for managers? Quality time can spawn new perspectives among people in the industry. Workload is a stumbling block for real strategic development that grows organically inside the company. To reiterate, quality managerial time is the organization’s strategic resource. Crazed managers are not capable of creating value for the organization. Period.

The potential is there, but is not fulfilled because of the wasteful allocation of the managers’ time resource. True, managers often boast that they work hard and under a great deal of pressure. In fact, many managers believe that this is how it should be: “I am actualizing the organization’s infrastructures”. This idea comes from the confusion between efficiency and effectiveness. It is standard to say that a company should be managed efficiently: maximum output with a fixed input. This does not fit a business environment where most of the attention is required to manage changes. We believe that effectiveness should be sanctified: To what degree have we achieved the goal? And, what is the goal? Creating ongoing value, of course.

Proper strategic management sanctifies the managers’ quality time (at all levels). This is how their professional, managerial and strategic capabilities can be improved. This resembles the person hacking off banana bunches: wielding his machete and hacking away. He needs to get as much done as possible. The managerial dilemma: When to stop and sharpen the machete? After all, this is how he (seemingly) wastes his time on unproductive work. And the machete keeps cutting more poorly. When will he stop? He will obviously work better, faster, and more easily after sharpening his tool.

Therefore, strategic management sanctifies quality time. Quality time is necessary for improving core skills. For example:

[* Strategic issue: An issue that has a fundamental effect on creating the company’s value.]

E. Strategic Management – Through Sharing and Coordinating

The management profession can be defined as: “Achieving aspired outputs by intelligent allocation of inputs”. The problem lies in the fact that the management profession is a grey area that is difficult to define. Subsequently, there are many versions of “proper management”. However, when discussing a private entrepreneur the issue is crystal clear: How do I achieve better output for my efforts and money?

Achieving the output is subject to forming the “right” strategic and implementing it. Strategy is no longer an issue for senior management: all the partners in the company must join together to implement it. There is no effective strategy implementation without sharing (and the experience of sharing!) during the formative stages.

The strategic process had very dynamic forms in the past decade. In fact, it is an integral part of the ongoing management. This paper does not deal with the strategic aspect, but rather with intelligent allocation of inputs to actualize the strategy.

Allocation of inputs to achieve aspired outputs is the heart of ongoing management. Many believe that most inputs stem from the cost of raw materials and production expenses. True, these are indeed expensive resources, but they are not critical. A critical resource is defined as an irreplaceable resource. Raw materials, manpower and production costs are replaceable. A person’s time in general, and management time in particular, is an expendable resource that cannot be replaced. Therefore, a strict discipline to manage this resource is required.

Many managers err here; give their people too much freedom. This is even worse in the upper echelons: the manager does not know how to manage his people’s time. The assumption is that everyone is doing their best for the organization. The time has come to shatter this myth: management that gives a free hand to their senior executives is actually saying the following: we do not have a strategic focus, and therefore we will let each of you do as you please. This is the greatest mistake of all.

The reason stems from the strategic plan: Does everyone have a strategy-focused agenda? A common claim is that “this is how you need to work, see how they work in high-tech”. This claim mostly comes from industry graduates. Above all, this claim presents its representatives as people that want to engage, as stated, in disciplines they see fit. According to us, focus is the basis for success. In essence, strategic management means managing the time of senior managers. Moreover, acknowledging and understanding what everyone needs to do as part of the organization’s fabric. How do you cause everyone to know what they are expected to do? Where did they succeed? Where did they fail? And… How do we change and improve?

Therefore, strategic management sanctifies quality time. Quality time is necessary for improving core skills. For example:

The correct combination of these components gives the manager a powerful ability to allocate his people’s time according to the organization’s strategy.

Remark: Unfortunately, there are too many places where educated and experienced people loath to cooperate with this work system. Do senior people not want to work under elementary control procedures? Good question. In any case, I urge managers not to stand for this phenomenon. Anyone that is not interested in this procedure is actually hinting to the manager: I have another agenda. If so, then that executive’s employment should be questioned.

Sorry, but this is not a subject for Human Resources. This is a dynamic tool to conduct an intelligent discussion between the manager and his people. It is best to let the manager prepare a draft of his job description and reach an agreed upon definition after several rounds of talks with his manager. This is how a basic focus of allocating the manager’s time is attained.

The standard feedback session model is based on judgment and evaluation from the human resource department school of thought. This is a remnant of the now-defunct employee evaluation system. We are not interested in judgment and evaluation that create a non-egalitarian and non-sharing discussion from the start. The simple alternative is 360-degree feedback sessions between the manager and subordinate, based on the job description. Here are several important points to keep in mind:

Drafting a work plan for the manager (together with his manager) is the tool that enables sharp and clear allocation of time to attain aspired outputs. Regular meetings that probe the following questions should be conducted:

Remark: The question “why” is the key for correct work. It enables topics that are supposedly known and clear to be raised. This will make it possible to learn and prepare a plan for the near planning horizon. You can work in the resolution of a week / month / quarter, preferably not beyond that.

Personal strength and courage are required to lead this work method in the organization. The basic assumption is that every organization will have regular people that will have a very hard time with this. The key to success is in a capable CEO: one with a high intellect, integrity, humility, desire and ability to involve everyone. And yes, courage. In the process we described, the CEO will need to be able to absorb and change direction frequently. This is what the business environment dictates. This is what the internal environment will dictate.

The success of the proposed process will enable the reading of internal and external reality, in real time. This is how strategic planning will become a part of the ongoing management. The signs from the business environment will be received in the organization and processed toward a perception of reality. Reading reality will require the organization to determine and stabilize the business direction. The business direction will enable an agenda to be built for reasonable time periods.

F. Recommended Literature

As promised, here is the list. The books are easy to read and very user friendly. However, you will have to dedicate quality time to this. The executive summaries are a bad solution. They do not provide a quality understanding, they provide “recipes”. We have already hinted that reading recipe books does not turn the reader into a chef. The list represents my own personal preferences: I see supreme importance in perspectives that assume that change of thinking and behavior in all spheres of the organization is the key to success. Here is a list in associative order.

1.   Changing Minds - Gardner
2.   The Profit Zone - Slywotzky & Morrison
3.  Strategy Safari – Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel
4.  The Value Mindset - Stern & Hutchinson
5.  Strategy Maps - Kaplan & Norton
6.  Why Not? - Nalebuff & Ayers
7.  How Customers Think – Zaltman
8.  Good to Great - Collins
9.  Management Challenges For The 21st Century - Drucker
10. Beyond Budgeting - Hope & Fraser
11. The Agenda - Hammer

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Strategy in the Manager’s Toolkit

The engine for creating ongoing value for an organization

A. Introduction

B. What Type of Management?

C. And What Type of Strategy?

D. What is the Relationship between Time Management and Strategy?

E. Strategic Management – Through Sharing and Coordinating

F. Recommended Literature

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