Category Archives: Rich Horwath

Rich Horwath

The 5 Myths of Business Strategy

By Rich Horwath

Rich Horwatch

Consider some of the most popular myths: Lightning never strikes the same place twice—it does. There is no gravity in space—there is, just less. Humans only use 10 percent of their brains—actually, a lot more—yes, even men. Pigeons blow up if fed uncooked rice—they don’t.

Which myths or half-truths have permeated your organization and what effect have they had on your business? Running a business on myths, flawed business principles, and baseless assumptions creates needless confusion and a lack of strategic direction.

A study of 10,000 senior executives showed that the most important leadership behavior critical to company success is strategic thinking at 97 percent. As a good strategy is at the core of any organization’s success, it’s important to understand the strategy myths that may be holding back your team from reaching greater levels of success.

Arm your team with the strategy myth busters and your business will soar higher. Click To Tweet

Strategy Myth 1: Strategy comes from somebody else.

“We get our strategy from the brand team/upper management.” This is a common refrain when managers in other functional areas are asked who develops a strategy. It’s also wrong. The strategy that you execute should be your own strategy. Why? Because each group’s resources are going to be different. For instance, the sales team has different resources—time, talent, and budget—than the marketing team or the IT team or the HR team. How they allocate those resources determines their real-world strategy. It’s important to understand the company, product and other functional group strategies to ensure that your strategies are in alignment. However, their strategies are not a replacement for your strategies.

Myth Buster: Identify the corporate strategies, product strategies, functional group strategies and your strategies and seek alignment.

Strategy Myth 2: Strategy is a once-a-year process.

In a recent webinar presented to more than 300 CEOs entitled, “Is Your Organization Strategic?,” the question was posed: “How often do you and your team meet to update your strategies?” The percentage of CEOs that meet with their teams to assess and calibrate strategies more frequently than four times a year is only 16.9 percent, with nearly 50 percent saying once-a-year or “we don’t meet at all to discuss strategy.”

A study of more than 200 large companies showed that the number one driver of revenue growth is the reallocation of resources throughout the year from underperforming areas to areas with greater potential. Strategy is the primary vehicle for making these vital resource reallocation decisions, but as the survey showed, most leaders aren’t putting themselves or their teams in a position to succeed. If strategy in your organization is an annual event, you will not achieve sustained success.

Myth Buster: Conduct a monthly strategy tune-up where groups at all levels meet for 1-2 hours to review and calibrate their strategies.

Strategy Myth 3: Execution of strategy is more important than the strategy itself.

A landmark twenty-five years study of 750 bankruptcies showed that the number one cause of bankruptcy was flawed strategy, not poor execution. You can have the most skilled driver and highest performance Ferrari in the world (great execution) but if you’re driving that Ferrari on a road headed over a cliff (poor strategic direction)—you’re finished.

A sure sign of a needlessly myopic view is that everything is an “either or,” rather than allowing for “and.” Strategy and execution are both important, but make no mistake that all great businesses begin with an insightful strategy. 

Myth Buster: Take time to create differentiated strategy built on insights that lead to unique customer value and then shape an execution plan that includes roles, responsibilities, communication vehicles, time frames and metrics.

Strategy Myth 4: Strategy is about being better than the competition.

Your products and services are not better than your competitors. Why? Because “better” is subjective. Is blueberry pie better than banana cream pie? It depends who you ask. “Is our product better than the competitor’s product?” is the wrong question. The real question is, “How is our product different than the competitor’s product in ways that customers value?”

Attempting to be better than the competition leads to a race of “best practices,” which results in competitive convergence. Doing the same things in the same ways as competitors, only trying to do them a little faster or better, blurs the line of value between your company and competitors. Remember that competitive advantage is defined as “providing superior value to customers”—it’s not “beating the competition by being better.”

Myth Buster: Identify your differentiated value to specific customer groups by writing out your value proposition in one sentence.

Strategy Myth 5: Strategy is the same as mission, vision, or goals.

Since strategy is an abstract concept, it is often interchanged with the terms vision, mission and goals. How many times have you seen or heard a strategy that is “to be no. 1,” “to be the market leader,” or “to become the premier provider of…?” Mission is your current purpose and vision is your future purpose, or aspirational end game. Goals are what you are trying to achieve and strategy is how you will allocate resources to achieve your goals.

Misusing business terms on a regular basis is like a physicist randomly interchanging element’s chemical structures from the Periodic Table. You can say that the chemical structure of hydrogen is the chemical structure for gold, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct. Starting with an inexact statement of strategy will derail all of the other aspects of your planning and turn your business into the equivalent of the grammar school volcano science project with red-dyed vinegar and too much baking soda.

Myth Buster: Clearly distinguish your goals, strategies, mission and vision from one another.

If left unchecked, strategy myths can cause you and your business to fail. A ten years study of 103 companies showed that the number one cause of business failure is bad strategy. Arm your team with the strategy myth busters and your business will soar.

Rich Horwath is a New York Times bestselling author on strategy, including his most recent book, StrategyMan vs. The Anti-Strategy Squad: Using Strategic Thinking to Defeat Bad Strategy and Save Your Plan. As CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, he has helped more than 100,000 managers develop their strategy skills through live workshops and virtual training programs. Rich is a strategy facilitator, keynote speaker, and creator of more than 200 resources on strategic thinking. To sign up for the free monthly newsletter Strategic Thinker, visit: www.StrategySkills.com.

Rich Horwath

5 Critical Steps to Better Meetings

By Rich Horwath

Rich Horwatch

Are your meetings creating valuable new insights for the business or are they a series of multitasking-filled monologues? Are they productive conversations about key business issues or a rehashing of the same stuff you’ve been talking about for months? Are your meetings getting better or worse?

Answer these five sample questions from the Strategic Meetings Assessment for the meetings you typically attend:

  1. Relevant information is sent out prior to meetings to avoid one-way presentations during the meetings. Yes__ No __
  2. Meetings start at their scheduled time. Yes__ No __ People are fully attentive and not engaged in multitasking (e.g., checking phones). Yes__ No __
  3. People leave meetings with a clear understanding of who is doing what by when. Yes__ No __
  4. I decline meeting invitations when the purpose and/or agenda have not been communicated. Yes__ No __

In this brief sample, a score of three or more “No’s” indicates an opportunity to dramatically improve the efficacy and productivity of your meetings.

A meeting can be defined as a gathering of two or more people featuring collective interaction and engagement using conversations to make progress toward a purpose. Note the use of the words “interaction” and “conversations” in the definition. If you find yourself in meetings and especially teleconferences on a regular basis where the format is primarily one-way presentation, there’s ample opportunity to improve your situation.

Effective meetings can be energizing forums to help your team set direction, make decisions, and unify efforts. Click To Tweet

Research shows that meetings consume about 40 percent of working time for managers. Key data points from research to consider:

  • Up to half of the content of meetings is either not relevant to participants or could be delivered outside of a meeting. 
  • 20 percent of meeting participants should not be there.
  • 40 percent of the meeting time is spent on information that could be delivered before the meeting.
  • 50 percent of meetings executives attend are rated as “ineffective” or “very ineffective.”

There are five critical steps you can follow to help your organization take a more strategic approach to meetings and teleconferences:

1. Conduct a meetings audit

Before a doctor prescribes a medication, she first diagnoses the patient’s condition. In the same spirit, before you prescribe new meeting guidelines, it’s helpful to first baseline what’s happening today. Look at factors such as the types of meetings you attend, the frequency of meetings, and the length of meetings. Then identify the reasons these meetings exist and if there are any meetings that are not necessary. Once the audit is complete, it provides a bounty of useful information to shape the future state of meetings.

2. Identify current meeting mistakes 

Meeting mistakes occur in three phases: pre-meeting, in-meeting, and post-meeting. They can also be categorized as either leader or participant mistakes. For example, a common in-meeting mistake by the leader is failing to rein in off-track conversations. A common in-meeting mistake by participants is multitasking, which conveys a lack of interest in the topic and/or a lack of respect for the person speaking at the time. There are approximately twenty-five mistakes to look for in the three phases to ensure that the group is not sabotaging their own efforts at improvement.

3. Educate managers on what good looks like 

Begin this step by collecting the current best practices being used by managers within the organization. Then look externally to see what principles and guidelines are being used by other organizations within and outside your industry as it relates to meetings. Examples of best practice principles include things such as “identify decisions to make in the meeting” and “create a virtual table of participants for teleconferences.” Use these best practices to compile a list of new meeting standards.

4. Utilize meeting tools

One of the keys to leading effective and efficient meetings is aligning the goals of the meeting with the appropriate tools and processes to get there. For instance, if you’re leading a strategy development meeting, there are more than seventy different strategic thinking tools you can choose from to help your team think and plan strategically. The key is to select the handful of tools that make the most sense based on the context of the team, business goals, competitive landscape, etc. Be clear on your meeting goals and then choose the process and tools to get there.

5. Develop meeting checklists

Research in the social sciences on habits shows that in order to effectively change someone’s behavior, it’s helpful to provide physical or environmental triggers. One highly effective trigger is the use of meeting checklists. These physical reminders ensure that teams across the organization are aware of the basic meeting principles, techniques, and tools to optimize their meeting time. However, the checklists are only valuable if they are accompanied by the corresponding discipline to utilize them on a consistent basis.

Effective meetings can be energizing forums to help your team set direction, make decisions, and unify efforts. Ineffective meetings can be anchors that weigh people down with irrelevant information, didactic presentations, and unclear priorities. Which type do you attend today? Do you think it will be different tomorrow?

Rich Horwath is a New York Times bestselling author on strategy, including his most recent book, StrategyMan vs. The Anti-Strategy Squad: Using Strategic Thinking to Defeat Bad Strategy and Save Your Plan. As CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, he has helped more than 100,000 managers develop their strategy skills through live workshops and virtual training programs. Rich is a strategy facilitator, keynote speaker, and creator of more than 200 resources on strategic thinking. To sign up for the free monthly newsletter Strategic Thinker, visit www.StrategySkills.com.