"Who has time for strategy when 'execution' is all that really matters?"
March 7, 2006
Dateline Amsterdam, Netherlands. Travel this week for client work brings me to Amsterdam. Not a city I would run back to, but we will save that for another posting. One of the advantages of traveling to Europe however is reading the Financial Times. In Europe the strange orange colored paper is widely read, and when I see articles like this one, it is no wonder why:
Is this the end of corporate strategy?
By Stefan Stern Published: March 5 2006 17:35
The article makes a very balanced argument that commercial entities must have not only a vision but a coherent strategy. The article tackles this excellent question that all too many change agents in government find themselves wrestling with, "Who has time for strategy when 'execution' is all that really matters?"
As we discussed in the change agent paper, it's not easy to remove people from their business as usual mentality within bureaucracies. This part of the article below describes a scene that should be familiar to many, and the analogy to a musician is very apt and colorful. Please note we left intact the British spelling of the word 'organization.'
"Thinking within the organisation gets grooved," Prof Bower says. "Most of us, when you ask us to do something, we do what we know how to do. Think about musicians. What will they play? They play the instruments they know, from the repertoire they know. They are no different from managers. Managers give you options based on what they know to do, and their repertoire."
Organisations may unwittingly suppress managers’ ability to offer alternative courses of action. "We may have repertoires we don’t use because we are not being paid to do that - we are being measured one way, so that’s what we do," Prof Bower adds.
"We design boxes precisely so that people will be in them. That’s the whole idea. And if you are looking at a problem that requires a different skill set you are probably going to have to get some different people. Or find it elsewhere within the organisation."
Yet change agents, especially Dogged Conceptualizers are people not mired in the day to day organizational think and thus their ability to think outside of silos is a skill that the organization must cherish and nurture. But there are few job descriptions across the federal government for people who fit the Dogged Conceptualizer category. They can be grown organically within agencies but it’s rare.
The government agencies that attract from the outside and then nurture what I term a kitchen cabinet of Dogged Conceptualizers are the agencies that will not compare themselves to themselves nor fail to think outside of the silos.
The article and books cited within the article are well worth considering.
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