News & Years

A look back at 2021

Friends,

Here we are, on the eve of a new beginning and the last Strategy in Praxis of 2021.

In the twelve months that have now come and gone, Facebook decided to go meta, the Gates decided to get divorced, Bezos decided to leave Amazon, James Hankins and I laid out the fundamental economic challenges of e-commerce worryingly long before most anyone else picked up on it, and Omicron provided the latest iteration of the utter fucking bastard that is Covid.

I would say that the year has been odd, though it all seems on par for the current course.

Yet amid the craziness of a world seemingly going southwards fast, the warmth, compassion, generosity and love shown by friends, online acquaintances and even complete strangers have undoubtedly made it one to remember.

When I launched this inconspicuous stream of incoherent thoughts and ramblings back in February, I had no idea what might come. In the weeks and months since, the newsletter has grown to thousands of weekly readers, with more coming each and every week. To say that it is humbling would be a massive understatement, just as the suggestion that it is all of my doing would be utter nonsense.

This grows because of you.

By sharing, commenting and subscribing, you create the rings on the water that tell the rest of the world that, to paraphrase what someone very kindly told me, in a still sea of sameness, something is making a splash.

It certainly motivates me to keep going. When I decided to leave the consultancy that I had co-founded in order to become a fully independent consultant, I knew that the pandemic would cause all sorts of bumps in the proverbial road. In retrospect, that has been putting it mildly.

I know that many of you are going through the same, and it is for this reason that I changed the free vs paid newsletter cadence. As clichéd as it doubtlessly may sound, we are all in this together.

Of course, I also want to ensure that those who choose to spend their hard-earned luca on me – which is making a tangible change in my life, particularly with a newborn child – get something special. Thus, for 2022, I have a couple of really, really nice perks lined up for paying subscribers.

More on that to come. Today, as alluded to last week, we are going to take a brief look back at what has been, as is customary this late time of year.

Starting out, the focus was very firmly placed on the difference between the modern scientific view of organizations and markets (as being human complex adaptive systems) on one hand, and the traditional belief that they are mechanistic on the other. This allowed us to draw a number of crucial conclusions regarding strategy, such as the fallacy of attempting to reduce performance into any one thing, the dangers of the famous (and oft-argued for) big bet, and the merits of enabling coherence instead of attempting to achieve alignment.

Indeed, the realization that the results of what we do as strategists are enabled rather than caused was and is to many what one might call an old universe shattering insight. For various reasons, some of which undoubtedly have to do with ego, we prefer to believe that business performance can be directly linked to our strategies (particularly when the results in question are positive). In reality, that is rarely the case. Rather, we help create the conditions under which certain behaviors might emerge.

Metaphorically speaking, we are gardeners more so than car mechanics. If we do our job well, and we are lucky, the clients’ businesses might bloom. Of course, we may also be unlucky; an untimely night of frost can kill the seeds we have planted, just as an unrelenting sun may dry out the soil and destroy anything that has sprouted from it.

The only thing we can know for certain is that there will be uncertainty; many things will be entirely out of our control whether we like it or not. The suggestion that a strategy only ever equals a plan therefore becomes a bit silly. Planning, in some form, is often a part of what a strategist does, yet rarely all of it.

In order to unearth what strategy actually is, to move beyond the orthodoxy and ultimately create a new and pragmatic framework (what I call ABCDE), we therefore launched a series of in-depth critical analyses. So far, we have discussed:

• Stephen Bungay’s strategic intent,

• Richard Rumelt’s guiding policy,

• Roger Martin’s where to play/how to win,

• Henry Mintzberg’s strategic perspective,

• Alexander Osterwalder’s business model canvas,

• John Kay’s concept of obliquity,

• visioning and missioning as detailed by Bob de Wit,

• Michael Porter’s generic strategies,

• Kim and Mauborgne’s blue ocean strategy,

• Igor Ansoff’s Ansoff matrix, and

• Bruce Henderson’s growth share matrix.

Coming up, we have Prahalad and Hamel’s notion of core competence, McKinsey’s 7S model, Michael Porter’s Five Forces, Robert Burgelman’s SBE process model, Kenichi Ohmae’s 3C framework and much more.

2021 was also, and by comparison much more significantly, very much a year of life and death. In April, the world lost one of its best sons. Murray Calder was a man among men, taken far, far too soon. Of course, he would want us to find joy in his memory rather than mourn his passing, but he will forever be sorely missed.

A month and a bit ago, someone else entered our world. On November 25, my wife (whom I shall never find words strong or beautiful enough to describe) gave birth to our daughter, Idun.

As any first-time parent throughout history would be able to tell you, the time since has been interesting to say the least - and it has all merely started.

Just as Strategy in Praxis and the community we are collectively building around it.

2022 will be a year to look forward to for all sorts of reasons, both personally and professionally. Thank you, genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, for subscribing, for engaging, for supporting, for being with me on this journey. I will do my very best to repay you - and I promise plenty of exciting news in the weeks to come.

Until then, I hope that you have the loveliest of New Years.

Onwards, upwards and towards the best year of our lives yet,
JP