A few years ago I found myself sitting next to a gentleman working for a rival technology firm on a 14 hour plane flight. Competitors are always great people to chat with and to butcher a Great War analogy, when you’re in the trenches, you have a lot in common with anyone else in a trench, regardless of which side they’re on. Despite what the media wants you to believe, there is a lot more sportsmanship than vitriol in the tech world. Tech competition is much more like Chess than Religious War (but this truth will never drive ad-clicks on tech blogs). So, when I asked the inevitable “What do you do?” question, I was disappointed by the answer “I work on strategy”.
This is not a thing.
Strategy is not something you do. Doing something is something you do. Doing something should accrue to a strategy, but strategy by itself is not a thing.
Since living in the United States, I meet a lot of people from a wide variety of industries working on (or claiming to work on) “strategy & planning”, without really focusing on doing. The act of thinking is put on a pedestal, but implementation is something that is almost viewed as trivial. Maybe this is cultural, something taught in business schools, or even an evolutionary response to the rise of outsourcing.
However, I have seen so many IT strategies fail due to poor execution, I am starting to believe that “execution is more strategic than strategy”. When you are executing, the truth can emerge more obvious on the front line and solving problems at scale is much easier when you know how to solve it once. If a marketer can’t convince one person, how can they convince a million? If an engineer can’t write a single line of code, can they write a million? Without regular and thorough practice, it is easy to become out of touch. And if you are out of touch, “strategic thinking” is the last thing you want to be doing.
It is easy to forget that experience makes strategies better. I try to treat implementation and execution work as opportunities to “hone my craft” rather than time taken away from thinking about Big Important Things.
Superstratum 