Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 24Q1-24Q3
Every year, I create three main presentations. For 2024, they are:
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: How to thrive in an uncertain world.
Regression Toward the Meme: Why modern leadership falls into old traps - and what to do about it.
The Efficiency Illusion: Uncovering the hidden costs of digital commerce.
If you want to book me for your event, workshop, or corporate speaking slot, just send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my schedule is filling up fast - and I will be raising my prices on January 1.
All presentations are adapted to fit the event. Entirely customized presentations, including topic, are available upon request at an additional cost. More information can be found here.
A couple of updates before we go-go
Well, first things first. I did in fact manage to dodge most of the cold. My wife, on the other hand, still has to breathe through her mouth to the extent that you might be led to believe she was a Trump supporter.
Apart from that, the last few days have been almost entirely lovely. We went up north; the weather was great, snowboarding conditions were excellent, and my wife got to take a ride on an electric snowmobile - the first in Sweden, apparently. Happy days.
Of course, we therefore got home to find a leaky roof (hence the tardy newsletter). At this point, I am starting to suspect that one of my ancient relatives insulted a witch before walking into a mirror under a ladder while carrying a black cat. If luck were a zero-sum game, Jeff Bezos ought to send me a thank you note.
Ah, the joys of house ownership.
Moving on.
The year that was
Strategy in Praxis, 2023 edition
Q1
We began the year by celebrating our centennial newsletter, but soon launched into our first theme: forecasting. This included techniques such as superforecasting, but we also took a purely practical look aided by Andrew Willshire.
Next up was a breakdown of financial analysis and how we may establish a company’s strategy from looking at its quarterly reports, income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow. Our featured interviewee was none other than James Hankins.
Before moving onto the year’s second quarter, we also discussed some of the common misconceptions concerning culture and whether it is possible to design one or not.
Q2
As we moved from spring towards summer, we covered another couple of popular strategic frameworks - McKinsey’s 7S, and PEST, respectively - and broke down the common pitfalls of strategic planning and similar deterministic approaches. One of the challenges that we found was what we labeled the problem paradigm: the idea that strategy, above all else, is a problem solving mechanism. But what if one cannot be solved, or even defined?
In June, the summer guest writers began showing us why they really ought to be running the show. First up was Will Humphrey, who wrote about the importance of investing in whimsy. He was followed by Claire Strickett, whose post about the need for empathy in strategy ended up not merely being the most popular guest contribution, but also one of the top five best performing newsletters of the year. She was followed by Tom Kerwin’s notes on backcasting, and Andi Jarvis’ argument for narratives in order to build memory structures.
Q3
My co-author Steven McCrone took us into the second half of the year with a practitioner’s breakdown of the three horizons model, demonstrating that waiting often is tantamount to failure. Doug Garnett then concluded the guest contributions with an explanation of how successful organizations may emerge.
Yours truly returned with a look at how sloppy language leads to ineffectiveness, but how jargon may have its uses.
The next major theme was theory vs practice. We established that most strategic endeavors are brownfield projects, that there always will be surprises regardless of how much data we collect, and that as a result, anyone who claims able to provide a guaranteed result (within the context of strategy) is a charlatan.
Before moving to the last quarter of the year, we also had time to start a proper step-by-step of the ABCDE framework. First up was, obviously, A: aspiration - our shared understanding of success.
Q4
We began October with B: boundaries, after which followed (via an analysis of innovation at 3M) a series of webinars and posts directly relating to my new book: What to do when you don’t know what to do. This involved a look at some of the heaviest hitters of strategic management history, such as Frederick Winslow Taylor and Peter Drucker. It turned out that many of the fundamental truths of strategy were anything but, and that the theoretical ground upon which it is common to stand is a lot wobblier than previously believed.
Finishing the year, we demonstrated that distance from action often determines available strategic options, that most market events follow a Pareto distribution (with numerous important implications), and that there still are books worth buying for Christmas.
All in all, this edition included, a Strategy in Praxis newsletter hit your inboxes 52 times in 2023 (those not linked to above may be found in the archive). Hopefully, at least a few of them made you think differently about the work that you do.
Next week, I will reveal what 2024 will look like - and there are some significant changes coming that I am very excited to finally get to share with you. Before then, however, I want to take this moment to thank you for reading, supporting, and continuously providing feedback (99.9% of which has been genuinely lovely). If if were not for you, I would not be writing these words.
So thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being a part of the Strategy in Praxis community. It means more to me than I am able to express.
Until next time, have the loveliest of new years.
Onwards and upwards, with lots of love,
JP
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