#27—Is Your Strategy Office a Tax on the Business?: Jeff Walker

All right, so let's dive into this question of what the strategy office really is for.

And I think that's the central question of our exploration here is how do we know we're adding value here? First, talk to us about what do you mean when you talk about the center? What does that mean and what's not the center?

Yeah.

Maybe I'll start with the second part.

I think the center is not where you've got a group of smarter people who second-guess the businesses.

To me, it is not it.

I think more than a place on an org chart, Kyan, the center is a boundary, right? It's a decision boundary specifically.

So this is the place where the decisions fall when they are kind of naturally ones that impact the whole company.

That's what the center is to me.

So I can elaborate like enterprise allocation.

We've been talking about that word.

Seams between the businesses, right? Where things are either falling in the crack or they're trying to get across and may need a little bit of help.

And then that ownership perspective that spans all of the silos and the organizations that the pieces of paper can turn into real life boundaries.

That center to me wraps its arms

around all of those.

I love it because often when people think of the strategy office, they do think of, oh, these people think they are smarter and they're here to ask us questions that we need to respond to in order to kind of keep them out of our business, you know, and that really creates an unhealthy dynamic.

Now, what are some of the indicators that something should be better taken care of? How do you know when something is better done at the center? I'm not sure there's a

100% correct answer for every enterprise, but I guess the test that I've developed over the many years I've been doing this, as you said, mostly on the operating side, so being on the receiving end, of those helpful questions, air quotes around helpful.

The two tests I think I apply now, sitting on this side of it, as well as in the old side, are about scale and duration.

So to me, those are the two strongest tests, Kayan, about whether the center is really working on the stuff that it has the most unique entitlement to own, scale and duration.

Let me double click on scale.

And then when I hear scale, I can think of, hey, well, you don't have the budget in the unit.

I could think scale is that it requires collaboration or coordination across multiple places.

I can think of it in different ways to think about what you mean by scale.

So just tell us, what do you mean by scale? I mean, it can be all of those things.