Being based in Silicon Valley—though it could be pretty much anywhere that attracts the best and the brightest—I hear a lot about strategy, about being “strategic,” about “strategic decision-making” and so on. So I’m always interested to hear a new take on what strategy is all about.
My posts this month have drawn on HBR blogs, and this one is no exception. In “Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy,” Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, talks about why smart people are not necessarily the best strategists.
The problem, he says, is that smart people often look for the one “right” answer, and strategy is really about “making choices about an uncertain future.” There’s usually more than one possible choice of strategy and, as Mr. Martin so succinctly puts it, “In fact, even after the fact, there is no way to determine that one’s strategy choice was ‘right,’ because there is no way to judge the relative quality of any path against all the paths not actually chosen.”
Probably the most interesting part of Mr. Martin’s post, though, is his assessment of smart people as frequently “brittle,” with a need to be validated by others—where a true strategist is flexible, imaginative, and resilient. My gut tells me this is true, and I believe these qualities exist in ordinary, everyday people. One of my neighbors is a great example. I don’t think she has a lot of formal education. Her tattoos speak to an interesting and somewhat unorthodox life, but her imagination and willingness to try different approaches to a situation—she’s a master Internet researcher—identify her as a strategist. She’s navigated a long and trying period of unemployment, job retraining, and re-employment that might have flattened someone else. But she’s still standing. She’s moving forward and continuing to learn from others, which can be awfully difficult for those who are invested in their own intelligence. She’s the absolute antithesis of brittle.
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