Strategy Planning Analogy #563: Strategy by Trickery?

THE STORY
Awhile back I was reading an article about depression. The first half of the article looked at what causes a person to be chronically depressed. It said that based on research, the major difference between the chronically depressed and other people is that the chronically depressed cannot envision a scenario where their situation improves. By contrast, other people can envision the possibility of better times ahead.

That made sense to me, so I decided to read the second half of the article, where they were going to suggest a way to eliminate chronic depression. I expected the article to explain ways for the depressed individual to change their situation so that a better future was more possible. For example, I was expecting suggestions like:

·       Get an education.

·       Get out of unhealthy relationships.

·       Take some risks.

Instead, the article took an entirely different approach. It talked about mental trickery—ways to trick yourself into believing in a better future, even if a better future is not a realistic probability. That might work for a short period, but is that really a long term solution? Suddenly, I was no longer impressed with the article.

THE ANALOGY
Businesses have their own form of depression: depressed sales, depressed earnings, etc. When these types of depressions become chronic, the business is in serious trouble.

I think the cause of chronic depression in business can be similar to what was stated in the article mentioned above: the businesses cannot envision a scenario where the company, in its current state, can improve. After all, if they could imagine a way to improve the current state, they probably would embark on a strategy to do just that.

The remedy, in my opinion, is to change the current state, so that you can find a new path where prosperity is more likely. That could include tasks such as:

·       Changing one’s Position in the marketplace

·       Adding new Capacity or new Competencies

·       Reformulating the Business Model

But instead of this, many companies use an approach more like the one prescribed in the article. They use mental trickery to get themselves to falsely believe that if they just stay the course things will get better. Consequently, they don’t make the changes necessary to reach prosperity. The end result is a failed business.

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is that you cannot wish yourself into prosperity. Or, as stated in the title of a book by Sullivan and Harper, “Hope is Not a Method.”

When stated that way, it does sound silly to expect mere wishing or hoping to solve all your problems. But those aren’t the words used by the proponents of this approach. They use trickery and cloak it in terms like “Principles of Leadership.”

I’ve read it in many forms, and it usually goes something like this:       

• When times are tough, leaders are not allowed to show any signs of pessimism. They need to put on a smiley, optimistic face and deceive their underlings into believing that things are really much better than they appear.

•  Then the leaders are to tell their people that all they need to do is work a little harder, a little better and the future will become bright again.

•  Next, the leaders are supposed to set high targets for their people to achieve—a way of showing that the leader believes good results are still possible.

The optimistic pep talk and the high goals are supposed to motivate the team to achieve the impossible and get the business out of its economic depression.

Unfortunately, what we call “the impossible” usually is impossible, and a smiley pep talk full of hope and wishes won’t get the job done.

If your situation is bad, don’t trick your mind (or the minds of your team) into believing the situation is good. The solution is to get out of the bad situation. Find a new situation where the prospects for prosperity are significantly better.

Doing a better job of executing an obsolete strategy does not change the fact that the strategy is still obsolete. For example, no matter how well Kodak executed an analog film business model, it would not win in a world of digital imaging. Rather than work harder on executing a bad strategy, change paths and work on a executing a better strategy.

The solution requires change, and a lot of people are afraid of change. But we shouldn’t let that fear cause us to continue down the current course towards destruction.

Instead of following the prescription above, called “Principles of Leadership”, we should do the following:

·       Be honest with our people and let them know that the current strategy is not valid anymore. Show how a continuation on that path leads to failure.

·       Then, either:

o   Present to the team a valid case for adopting your newer, better strategy; or

o   Get the team involved in building that newer, better strategy itself.

·       Next, get the team to rally behind specific change initiatives needed to get from the current situation to the newer, better scenario.

SUMMARY
Bad times are typically not improved by getting better at doing the same things that got us into the bad situation in the first place. If your strategy is no longer valid, change the strategy. Replace hopes and wishes in the status quo with a serious re-evaluation of how to win in the marketplace and specific change initiatives designed to make the improved strategy a reality.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Denial is never a good approach. As long as we deny the fact that our current strategy is broken, we will never fix it. As they say, the first step in curing alcoholism is to admit that you have a problem. We need to have the courage to say our current strategy has a problem.

Anticipation and Creation

THE QUESTION
By almost any measure you can think of, free-market economies are superior to the highly planned economies of socialism/communism.  Free market economies create more total wealth and do a better job of raising the general standard of living for the whole society.

Yet, for many years, I have been advocating strategic planning for businesses.  This begs the question:

If the economy in total is better off with free markets versus planned markets, then why do I believe that individual companies are better off having strategic planning?

This question is becoming more relevant based on the most recent book by Nasssim Nicholas Taleb, called “Antifragile.”  You may recall Taleb’s earlier book, “The Black Swan,” which caused quite a stir.

In Antifragile, Taleb takes a dim view of strategic planners.  His claim is that strategic planners do more harm to businesses than good in their attempt to gain control by way of rooting out the risk of randomness.  Taleb believes that the unintended consequences of these acts are to add delay, complication and inflexibility to the very business they are trying to improve.  As a result, instead of saving the business, the planning increases the risk of failure. 

This is a valid concern.  I have seen examples where this type of result has occurred.  For example, in the name of reducing risk by sharing knowledge and expertise, large shared services organizations are built.  These shared services organizations, if structured improperly, can add delay, complication and inflexibility to a business.  In two instances I am personally aware of, these negative results were so severe that the shared service organizations were dismantled.

So we cannot just dismiss the argument posed in this book.  We need an answer to the question.

 

ANSWER #1:  SURVIVING CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
One of the main reasons why a free economy is superior to a planned economy is due to the concept Joseph Schumpeter referred to as creative destruction.  The general idea of creative destruction is that great improvements to the economy do not come from proactively tweaking the status quo.  Instead, they come from allowing the status quo to die and be replaced by something far superior.  Only by freely allowing marketplace churn—letting old business models be destroyed by new business models—does the market make great leaps forward.

And the beauty is that, when left free of excessive planning, the market will do this creative destruction all by itself.  It is when we try to interfere and protect the status quo that we hinder the ability of the marketplace to make great strides. 

In a macro sense, allowing creative destruction has much merit.  But business leaders live in a micro world.  Their primary role is not the health of the total economy, but the health of their business.  Freely allowing their business to be destroyed in the name of Creative Destruction will not win them any praise from their stakeholders (shareholders, lenders, employees, etc.).  No, these stakeholders want the business leaders to cause their businesses to survive and thrive regardless of what is happening in the macro economy.

I believe that the best way to do this is via planning (we’ll discuss how to do this further below).

 

ANSWER #2:  NOT ALL PLANNING IS GOOD PLANNING
In his excellent book “Good Strategy/Bad Strategy,” Richard Rumelt makes the case that most of what is practiced today in the name of strategy is truly awful.  Worse than just poor execution of good processes, Rumelt believes that much of what is called strategy today is not strategy at all.  It is just terrible actions which hurt businesses. 

I suppose Rumelt would agree with many of the points made by Taleb.  In the name of strategy, a lot of negative activity is taking place.  But that is no reason to abandon strategic planning.

That would be like saying that just because some doctors conduct malpractice, we should abandon the science of medicine.  Or, because some reporters distort the facts, we should ban all news organizations.    

No, the proper response would be to eliminate the bad practices and promote good, healthy planning which works in concert with creative destruction rather than against it.

 

 
ANSWER #3:  GOOD PLANNING IS NOT ABOUT PRESERVATION
My first rule of strategy is this:  “ALL strategic initiatives eventually fail.”  My second rule of strategy is this:  “You are not an exception to rule #1.  YOUR strategic initiative will eventually fail.”

The primary reason why strategic initiatives eventually fail has a lot to do with the forces of creative destruction.  The environment in which you conduct business keeps changing.  What was the best thing to do in one environment is usually not be the best thing to do in a different environment. As the environment changes, your original strategic initiative becomes less relevant.  If you do not change, eventually your strategic initiative becomes irrelevant and you die—destroyed by creative destruction.

But here is where my rule #3 comes in: “Just because strategic initiatives die does not mean that your company has to die.  As long as you continually abandon failed strategic initiatives and replace them with relevant initiatives, the company will outlast any individual strategic initiative.”

The idea here is that good strategic planning is not primarily about trying to preserve the status quo or reduce the risk within the status quo.  It is about preparing yourself to prosper in a world where the status quo changes.

Hence, two of the most important words in good strategic planning are ANTICIPATION and CREATION.

Yes, the environment is changing.  But the change is rarely random.  There is logic behind the change.  The impact of an aging population can be roughly predicted.  The impact of business life cycles can be roughly predicted.  Advances in technology can be roughly predicted (like Moore’s Law).  As a result, the future environment should not be a complete surprise.  It can be ANTICIPATED.  And if something can be anticipated, then it can be prepared for.  And that is a key role for good strategy—to help companies better anticipate the changing environment in which they must prosper (and find ways to best exploit what is anticipated).

Why I would even argue that unusual Black Swans (events which have never before occurred) can be anticipated.  Sure, we won’t know the exact nature of the next potential disaster, be it a tsunami, earthquake, nuclear meltdown, housing crisis or whatever.  But bad, unusual things cycle through on a fairly regular basis.  And the best strategic response to negative black swans often doesn’t vary much.  There are only so many ways a black swan can impact the environment, no matter what it is.  Through the anticipative act of scenario planning, one can have a set of pre-planned responses which will work for almost any black swan.

However, even stronger than anticipation is CREATION.  Creative destruction occurs when a company reinvents the rules in a way which renders the status quo obsolete.  Those who are early masters of the new status quo typically gain disproportionate benefits.  Creative destruction has to be created by someone.  It may as well be you.  After all, isn’t it better to destroy someone else’s status quo than to have someone else destroy your status quo?

As Peter Drucker put it, “The best way to predict the future is to create the future.”  Therefore, good strategic planning looks at ways to reinvent business models—to create the next cycle of creative destruction.  In essence, the planning process is not used to preserve the status quo, but to become a leader in controlling how the status quo will be destroyed.

This is somewhat similar to the Blue Ocean approach to strategy.  The idea is to use planning to look for new, uncontested spots in the marketplace.  In other words, instead of trying to win in the highly competitive red ocean of the status quo, create your own new status quo (the blue ocean).

Strategic planning as a source for anticipation and creation might even be an approach that both Rumelt and Taleb would find acceptable.

 

SUMMARY
Even though highly planned economies tend to be inferior to a more free-market economy, that doesn’t mean that planning is a worthless activity for individual companies.  Planning is worthwhile for individual companies, because it provides a means for them to survive the forces of creative destruction—either through anticipation or creation.   However, not all processes labeled “planning” focus on anticipation and creation.  Some focus on trying to preserve the status quo.   In a world where all strategic initiatives eventually fail, that second approach is not a recipe for long-term success.

 

FINAL THOUGHTS
The best planning looks forwards, not backwards.  As hockey great Wayne Gretzky put it, skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.  Anticipation drove his actions.  You should be driven by the same thing.

Strategic Planning Analogy #476: Passion for What

THE STORY
Back in the late 1990s, I went to a seminar at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  There was a panel of experts talking about the future of connected consumer homes.

Most of the “panel of experts” were the geekiest of geeks, the nerdiest of nerds.  They each seemed to live in homes with about a half dozen satellite dishes on them and about four different sets of connectivity wires running through their houses.  They had all sorts of bizarre homemade networking devices trying to connect all their computers.  And they were predicting that eventually all consumers would have homes as geeky as theirs.

The audience was almost as geeky as the panel and were nodding their heads in approval.  That is, until the last panel member began to speak.

The last member was not geeky or nerdy.  He was a consumer marketer.  He had done consumer research and found that the average person would not put up with all of that geeky stuff.  The audience started to boo him walked out in disapproval.

Well, here we are, about 15 years later.  None of the geeky predictions came to pass and the marketer was right. 

 

THE ANALOGY
The members of the so-called “panel of experts” were extremists in their enthusiasm for consumer electronics and technology.  It was their passion.   They knew all the jargon.  They were willing to devote all their spare time to learning the obscure technology behind it.  They could build their own computers and program them to do specialized tasks.

In other words, they were not normal.

These people mistakenly believed that eventually everyone else would have the same level of passion as they did for all this geeky stuff.  In other words, they felt that eventually, their odd behavior would become normal.  It did not.

As it turns out, the panel member who best understood the future of the connected home had no passion for the subject.  His expertise was in listening to the customer, who was saying something entirely different.

I’ve been around a lot of companies who are looking for passionate employees.  I’ve seen a lot of job advertisements looking to hire people with passion for the products the company was selling.  The rationale is that employees who are passionate about the product are better employees.

But is that really true?

That panel of experts was so passionate for their business that the members were blind to the fact that they were outliers in society.  They were so abnormal that they couldn’t understand normal people.  And normal people are the customers.  As a result, they completely missed the mark on helping businesses in the industry prepare for the future.

Instead, it was the one panel member who was not biased by personal passion (the marketer), who could accurately hear the customer and give sound advice.

This excessive passion can be particularly messy for strategic planners.  If they are too passionate for the business they are in, they can become biased extremists who are blind to the realities of normal people.  As a result, their strategic recommendations can be way off the mark and hurt the companies they work for. 

 

THE PRINCIPLE
The principle here is that it is often better to hire people who have passion for their individual job skill than passion for the business where they apply that skill.  In other words, if you are in the green energy business, it is better to hire an accountant who is passionate about accounting than one who is passionate about green energy. 

There are many reasons why I believe this:

1. Improper Bias

In the story, we saw that the people with excessive passion had a biased and distorted view of the world.  Their extremism blinded them to what normal people are like.  They rejected consumer research (the facts), because it did not line up with their distorted, passionate viewpoint.  As a result, they became useless in helping companies address the needs of normal people.

I’ve seen this occur in multiple companies, where passionate extremist employees would promote all sorts of crazy ideas and bad strategies based on the notion that they found it appealing to their own passions.  Their rational was, “I would like that, so everyone else should like it, too.”

Unfortunately, the ultra-passionate segment of most businesses is quite small.  There are not enough of them to support these ideas.  Just because abnormally passionate people like something does not mean that normal people would also like it. 

And when you fill a company with passionate extremists, they start thinking that they are closer to normal than they really are, because all of their co-workers share the same biased extreme.  This leads to bad forecasts, bad strategies, and bad results.

Think about the battery-powered automotive industry.  Many of the companies were filled with employees who loved the idea of electric cars and thought everyone else should love them too.  So they came up with business models that were far too optimistic and now many of these businesses are going bankrupt.

2. The Charitable Cause Phenomenon

Although there are some great charitable organizations out there, I’d have to say that some of the worst-run businesses I’ve ever seen are charitable organizations.  Why?  Usually it is because the people running the business have more passion for the cause than for their individual job. 

They want to be a part of the cause, so they will do whatever job they can get to become a part of it.  That often means doing jobs for which they are not the most qualified.  Yes, passion can make up for some skill inadequacies, but often not enough to make many of them truly productive.  Just because their heart is in the right place doesn’t mean they are best qualified to get their job done.

Organizations need a lot of different skill-sets, from as mundane as janitorial or data entry to as sophisticated as a strategist, CEO, CIO, or COO, etc.  If people do not have lots of skills or passion for their individual task, then that task will not get done well.  If enough tasks don’t get done well, then the entire organization starts to fall apart.

That is why I like people’s primary passion to be around their assigned task, rather than the business.  That way, the people are happily excelling on that which they are assigned to do, because that is their love and passion.

3.  The Stockholm Syndrome

The Stockholm Syndrome is based on studies which show that people captured by terrorists will, over time, tend to become more sympathetic to the views of their captors. If normal people can start feeling more like the radical extremists who captured and tortured them, then I think normal people can start feeling good about the businesses which capture the bulk of their waking hours.

In other words, if you take a great accountant and put him or her into a green energy company, most over time will become more sympathetic to the green energy cause.  It is a natural consequence.

However, I don’t think the opposite is necessarily true.  If I take someone who loves green energy and is only moderately interested in accounting and put them into a green energy company, I don’t think they become a lot more passionate about being an accountant. 

Therefore, hire people who are passionate about their task, and you can train them to care about the business.  This will work out better than hiring people who love the business and then try to get them to love their individual job.

That’s why you commonly hear people in service businesses say that they look for people who love giving service (their job) and then train them in their business.  This works a lot better than finding people intimately in love with the business but have no desire to serve.

 

SUMMARY
Great strategies rely on great insight and great execution.  Great insight and execution often are at odds with people who are excessively passionate about the business they are in.  First, their excessive passion biases them so they cannot see the realities of the normal world.  Therefore, their insights are inaccurately biased and subject to failure.  Second, people who are doing jobs based on their passion for the business rather than a passion for their job are not the best at doing their job, so execution suffers.  A better approach is to fill your business with people who are passionate for the skills of their individual task.  They will execute well on more accurate assessments of reality.

 

FINAL THOUGHTS
I have been a strategist at many companies where I did not have an excessive passion for the products being sold.  And I was proud of that.  I would tell people that this kept me from becoming too biased based on personal distortions.   I was forced to listen to the customer.  Second, my passion was for doing strategy, so they would get great strategies (and isn’t that what they hired me for in the first place?).

Strategic Planning Analogy #467: The Flavor Conspiracy

THE STORY
There’s a global conspiracy out there which is trying to get you to believe a lie.  I call it “The Flavor Conspiracy.” 

Think about those artificial flavors.  You can find “cherry” flavor in hundreds of items, from candy to cough syrup.   And every item which claims to have the “cherry” flavor tastes exactly the same.  If everyone is claiming that to be cherry flavor and they all have the same flavor, then that flavor must be the flavor of a cherry, right?

WRONG!  If you were to bite into a real cherry and it tasted like the so-called cherry flavor, you’d spit it out and say that it tasted funny.  Real cherries don’t have the flavor of what manufacturers call cherry.  It’s a lie!

That artificial banana flavoring is even worse.  The flavor doesn’t even come close to that of a real banana.  But every manufacturer uses that same imitation flavor and calls it “Banana Flavor.”  Just because they are all telling the same lie does not make it true.  It’s merely a conspiracy—the flavor conspiracy.

 

THE ANALOGY
A similar conspiracy is taking place in the world of strategic planning.  There is a lie out there that strategy is little more than setting numeric goals and then tracking progress against those goals.  Just shout the numeric goal and plot the progress on some dashboards and spreadsheets and you are done.  Your strategy is complete (except perhaps for additional shouting when the goals are not met).

In more and more companies, this is pretty much how strategy planning is defined.  It is a small offshoot from accounting, where being a CPA is considered a primary prerequisite to working in strategic planning (since those people are skilled in tracking numbers).  If you don’t believe me, go to a job openings site like www.indeed.com and search for strategic planning positions.  Most of the job descriptions tend to move in that direction.

But just because everyone is calling that “strategy” does not make is so, no more than claiming that artificial banana flavoring tastes like bananas makes it so.  It is still a lie.  The conspiracy of having large numbers of people promoting the lie may make it harder to go against the flow.  But that doesn’t mean the majority is right.

Just as those artificial flavors do not accurately represent what the true fruit flavors are, this idea of strategy as merely goal monitoring does not represent what true strategic planning is.   

 

THE PRINCIPLE
The principal here is that unless the planning community stands up to the goal monitoring conspiracy, real strategy will fall away.  It will be like people who never got to taste the real fruit, so they have no reason to reject the false artificial flavors.  Similarly, unless we show the business community what real strategy looks like, the false notion about strategy will be all they know, so they will have no reason to reject it.  They will not know what they are missing.  And they will be missing a lot.  In this blog, I will refer to what is missing as the three R’s.

1. Missing A Reason

Numerical goals are nice, but if you have no reason for why the goal is attainable, then there is no reason why you should assume the goal will be attained.  For example, I could have a goal of wanting to be seven feet tall (2.13 meters).  But I have no reason for why my mature body should suddenly become so much taller.  Therefore, I am unlikely to reach my goal.

Similarly, expecting a mature business model to suddenly jump significantly in sales or profits without any underlying reason is also highly unlikely.  Without a reason, that goal is rather worthless.  And improving the accuracy in your tracking of that goal does not make the goal any more reasonable. 

In my latest book, The Most Important Question, I talk about how the most important question in strategy is “Why should a customer naturally prefer me over the alternatives?”  If you have no reason for why a customer should prefer you, then they will not prefer you.  There will be no reason to expect results to suddenly get better and reach much higher numbers because you have not given customers a reason to reward you with higher numbers.

Sure, you can work a little harder and a little longer at the same old approach and perhaps squeeze out a few drops of extra performance.  But this has a very limited impact.  Any advantage from working harder is usually met with a competitive response which negates the advantage.  And the extra pressure could chase away your best employees or cause them to create more errors due to fatigue. 

 

Also, as markets change, you may find that your old status quo position is becoming less relevant.  And working harder at an obsolete approach doesn’t make it more relevant.  If you are not looking for reasons to succeed, you may not even notice the drift away from a relent reason to exist.  You will only see that goal.

Sure, you can overcome no reason to be preferred a bit by “bribing” the customer with lower prices or better deals.  This may increase sales a bit, but lower profits due to the cost of the added incentives.  And since most of these types of bribes or incentives are easy for competitors to copy or neutralize, they may not even improve sales.  Finally, since there is no underlying reason for why they customers should stay, you could lose those gains as soon as the “bribing” is stopped.

That is why true strategy doesn’t start with a numeric goal.  It starts with defining a position where you have a reason for being, a right to win.  It examines the marketplace to look for viable positions which are desirable, attainable and winnable.  It looks at both rational and emotional drivers of consumer behavior (something not found on a CPA exam).  It dreams up ways to be different from everyone else (whereas accounting tries to achieve conformity in rules with everyone else). 

And most importantly, true strategy questions the status quo to make sure you continue to have a reason to win in a changing marketplace.  It is willing to abandon old rules and adopt new ones.  It is a creative exercise more than a tracking exercise.

2. Missing Reinforcements

True strategy is about making strategic decisions regarding resources.  Where should I put extra resources; where should I take away resources?  Just having a numeric goal doesn’t tell you how to make those choices.   

Michael Porter says the essence of strategy is making the right trade-offs.  In other words, what do I de-emphasize, so that I can afford to create superiority somewhere else?  To answer that, you need to know:

 

       a)      Where you are trying to win (your reason);

b)      What business model makes winning possible;

c)      What attributes are most critical to that business model;

d)     How all the various parts of the business work together to reinforce the winning position.

True strategy isn’t just about telling the people you have today to go out and reach for a goal.  It may first be about eliminating lots of activities (and people) who need to be traded away so that investments can be made in new competencies and capabilities (and new people) that don’t currently exist in the business. 

Until you get the right infrastructure in place, shouting the goal may be shouting at the wrong people.  To win, you need to reinforce the areas of the business most critical to success.  To fund the reinforcement, you need to take funding away from less critical areas.  A true strategy points the way to how those trade-offs are made.  This is a complex task, requiring cooperation and a reduction of political in-fighting and turf wars (particularly from the areas being de-emphasized).  You won’t get that from just shouting a numerical goal.

3. Missing Restrictions   

Strategy is more than just saying which way to go.  It is also about saying which way not to go.  Strategy is about getting alignment around a proper go-to-market strategy.  It is about moving the company in a common direction, so that actions reinforce the reason for being. 

That means that there are more actions which can be wrong than can be right.  And if you are not specific about which activities are wrong, you will not stop them from occurring.   

There are lots of ways to hit a numeric goal.  And a lot of those ways can do harm to the long term prospects of a company.  For example, you can increase profits for a little while by:

a)      Eliminating necessary investments in maintenance or infrastructure;

b)      Destroying quality or damaging services;

c)      Raising prices to non-competitive levels.

In the long run, these actions can destroy a business.

If all you emphasize is hitting a goal, you can end up with all sorts of actions which hit the near-term goal, but destroy long-term prospects.  That is why a true strategy puts restrictions on activities to prevent wrong actions.  True strategy is more about doing the right thing than in hitting a number.  Because if you keep doing the right things, it is easier to hit good numbers year after year after year.  But if all you do is try to hit today’s number by any means possible, there may not be any future.

 

SUMMARY
Just because nearly everyone is doing the same thing doesn’t make it right.  Even if everyone says that imitation banana flavor tastes like bananas, it does not make it true.  Similarly, if most businesses are defining strategic planning as just goal setting and monitoring, that does not mean they are right.  True strategic planning is much more.  It involves determining a reason for winning, a well-thought out trade-off analysis about where to make reinforcements, and restrictions on bad behaviors.

 

FINAL THOUGHTS
Richard Rumelt, in his book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, says that a goal monitoring approach is bad strategy.  More specifically, Rumelt says that this type of bad strategy “is not the same thing as no strategy or strategy which fails rather than succeeds.  Rather, it is an identifiable way of thinking and writing about strategy that has, unfortunately, been gaining ground.  Bad strategy is long on goals and short on policy and action.  It assumes that goals are all you need. It puts forward strategic objectives that are incoherent and, sometimes, totally impractical.” 

In other words, this approach is not just doing strategy poorly.  It is taking on an approach which is the enemy of true strategy and poisons the mind so that true strategy cannot occur.  We need to fight this conspiracy.