Making Strategy Real | Evan Campbell

Yeah, so I've been talking with people about strategy.

I've been enjoying.

I think what's unusual about the book, Mike, is that there are a lot of strategy books out there, a lot of wonderful strategy books.

Most of them are about advice on how to conceptualize your strategy, how to develop and express your strategy.

It's really strategy development.

And one of the reasons I'm excited to be on with you is you and I both had the experience of encountering organizations who had actually developed good strategies, often in concert with expensive premier consulting companies that we all know, and really struggled to implement it.

And so my focus, and in many ways yours in strategy, has been helping organizations develop the capability to really realize that strategy that they've developed.

And one of the keys to actually implementing or realizing your strategic objectives is making the right investment decisions as a corporation or a company in what initiatives you fund, what projects you bring forth, and which ones you reject.

I have, and I assume you have, encountered so many organizations where the strategy isn't deployed down to product managers and portfolio managers and people making decisions investment decisions in a way that really enables them to maximize strategic returns from their portfolio investments.

And I think my book is the first one that really uses OKRs as the steel thread to make sure those investments are delivering the strategic objectives of the leadership of the company.

Yeah, you make a really good point.

And I always revert to the film, is it Field of Dreams? Yeah, Field of Dreams.

And I think that whole title is quite apt for a lot of strategy development as well, because it is dreams mainly.

But there's that thing where they're like...

I always see that connection with strategy and execution.

It's almost like the strategy is they'll build it, rebuild it, then it will happen.

Yeah.

And there isn't that connection, and you get all this noise, and it's the same thing.

You get all this energy around the strategy.

They've got the strategy.

We can argue at a different conversation if it's strategy or not, but then they get all the comms teams and all that lot, and they do the little... town halls and gatherings and they all the powerpoints they get the mugs out you know they get the you know the new cars on the um lanyards give those out yeah and they think that's it

right it's the commonest thing in the world It's crazy.

All the CEOs that I've spoken to who said, we spent $2-4 million for this fancy consulting company.

They left two years ago.

My board of directors... thinks that we're executing, they loved the strategy, they loved the PowerPoint deck and the videos, and they think we're actually executing it.