Chapter 12
Organization Development
All the King’s Horses, and All the King’s Men . . .
Strategy
Ask six different people about a definition of strategy and you’ll receive nine different responses. People use the term wrong all the time: training strategy, strategy to bring on new people, client response strategy—they’re really seeking tactics and plans.
Despite titles, and despite senior managers’ claims that strategy is their purview (“Why would we hire a consultant when we’re paid to develop strategy?”), remember that virtually no one in senior management or executive ranks was trained to be a strategist. That’s a fact. It’s not as if elevation to a certain office or executive dining room privileges creates strategic DNA, sort of like a brevet, where field promotion creates a new rank.
That’s why you hear so many definitions, or a too-often default position of the dreaded, feeble, ludicrous SWOT nonsense (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), which is to true strategy what kick the rock is to rugby.
Because of this ill-preparedness (which is even worse in nonprofits) and definitional confusion, strategy keeps getting clobbered. You hear phrases (and even titles) such as “strategic planning.” Let’s address that term here:
Strategy is the creation of a future picture of the enterprise—what it should look like, feel like, sound like, and smell like—from which you work backwards to determine viable routes to that destination. Planning is the extrapolation from the present ...
