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and reflection throughout the year. Don’t wait until one week before the strategic plan is due. Keep a
log of ideas you get from others, magazines, etc. Focus on how these impact your organization or
function.

6. Avoiding ambiguity? Embrace the uncertainty. Strategic planning is the most uncertain thing
managers do. It’s speculating on the near-unknown. It requires projections into foggy landscapes. It
requires assumptions about the unknown. Many conflict avoiders don’t like to make statements in
public that they cannot back up with facts. Most strategies can be questioned. There are no clean
ways to win a debate over strategy. It really comes down to one subjective estimate versus another.

7. Addicted to the simple? Embrace the complexity. Strategy ends up sounding simple—five clean,
clear statements about where we want to go with a few tactics and decisions attached to each.
Getting there is not simple. Good strategists are complexifiers. They extend everything to its extreme
before they get down to the essence. Simplifiers close too early. They are impatient to get it done
faster. They are very results oriented and want to get to the five simple statements before strategic
due process has been followed. Be more tolerant of unlimited exploration and debate before you
move to close.

8. Don’t know how to be strategic? Become a student of strategy. The simplest problem is
someone who wants to be strategic and wants to learn. Strategy is a reasonably well-known field.
Read the gurus—Michael Porter, Ram Charan, C. K. Prahalad, Gary Hamel, Fred Wiersema, and
Vijay Govindarajan. Scan the Harvard Business Review regularly. Read the three to five strategic
case studies in Bloomberg Businessweek every issue. Go to a three-day strategy course taught by
one of the gurus. Get someone from the organization’s strategic group to tutor you in strategy. Watch
CEOs talk about their businesses on cable. Volunteer to serve on a task force on a strategic issue.

9. Can’t think strategically? Practice strategic thinking. Strategy is linking several variables together
to come up with the most likely scenario. It involves making projections of several variables at once to
see how they come together. These projections are in the context of shifting markets, international
affairs, monetary movements, and government interventions. It involves a lot of uncertainty, making
risk assumptions, and understanding how things work together. How many reasons would account for
sales going down? Up? How are advertising and sales linked? If the dollar is cheaper in Asia, what
does that mean for our product in Japan? If the world population is aging and they have more money,
how will that change buying patterns? Not everyone enjoys this kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking and not
everyone is skilled at doing it.

10. Don’t want to be strategic? Get some help. Some just don’t feel they want to ramp up and learn to
be strategic. But they like their job and want to be considered strategically responsible. Hire a
strategic consultant once a year to sit with you and your team and help you work out your strategic
plan. Accenture. The Boston Consulting Group. McKinsey. Booz Allen Hamilton. Strategos. Plus
many more. Or delegate strategy to one or more people in your unit who are more strategically
capable. Or ask the strategic planning group to help. You don’t have to be able to do everything to be
a good manager. You like your nest? Some people are content in their narrow niche. They are not
interested in being strategic. They just want to do their job and be left alone. They are interested in
doing good work in their specialty and want to advance as far as they can. That’s OK. Just inform the
organization of your wishes and don’t take jobs that have a heavy strategic requirement.

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