#39 Making Strategy Work: Lessons for Leaders and Founders | with Alex M H Smith

Cool.

So, yeah, there are maybe there are like two big schools of bad strategy.

I mean, there are more, but some of them are so obvious that just I'm just going to assume that we are clued up enough not to fall into this trap.

Like we've all heard of like people mistaking goals for strategy.

Like our strategy is to become number one or something like that.

You know, so that that's so self-evidently stupid that let's not dwell on it.

Although it's still also very common.

Moving to a slightly more sophisticated level.

So one strategy.

So one big trap, which is sort of connected to the instinctive thing I said, is that people kind of mistake analysis and strategy.

So it's like we all understand that there's a difference between being a farmer and being a chef.

Right.

So like.

A farmer will produce the ingredients, but then the chef is the one who actually then creates something new out of those ingredients.

But in the world of strategy, I think that people basically think that the farmer is the chef.

And they think that if they produce enough food, ingredients, data, research, knowledge, analysis, then the dish emerges from that, which is not true at all.

And not only is it not true, but the people to do these jobs, the farmer and the chef are two different people and they require different skills.

And the analyst and the strategist are two different jobs and require two different skills.

And it's a shame that like a lot of analysts, we have this sort of idea that like somehow being a strategist is sort of sexy maybe, or sounds important.

And so people who are in who, let's say, are really analysts, they like to brand themselves as strategists because it sounds more important.

But they're doing both themselves and everyone else a disservice.

If you want to picture an archetypal strategist in your head, I always say you mustn't think of a person sitting in front of a spreadsheet kind of thing.

you need to picture in your head, if you watch the TV show Succession, Logan Roy from Succession would be an archetypal strategist.

Or if you haven't seen that, another person you can maybe picture is Richard Branson.

What we're talking about here is people who basically have comfort in making big calls in the face of kind of uncertainty and who are more fundamentally more intuitive than analytical.