What Good Is Strategy Without Action?

Watching professional sports this past weekend, I found myself thinking about insanity. And it’s not the insanity of sports or the fervor of the face-painted fan. It’s the insanity of business practices!

You’ve heard the classic definition of insanity, right? It asserts that insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Our sports teams seem to understand this concept. Most teams, with the exception of the New York Giants this past Sunday, change their attack, their strategy, if it isn’t working. Racing teams change the set up and pit strategy if the original plan is not working. How about business? Do businesses today change what is not working? Let’s look at the similarities of sports and business so we can understand the differences.

Sports and business seek winning scenarios. They plan, they strategize, they train and prepare and they invest in an approach that they believe will prove successful. But what happens if the play book or the racing strategy is not working on a given day? What if there is an unforeseen factor that has been introduced that changes the outcome of the proven approach? Let’s call this a variable. Sports franchises change their approach. They try something different. How about business? Does business change their strategy? Will they have the courage to admit the error of their approach and change strategy? Perhaps. But I would like to ask a more fundamental question: Do they really know when their strategy is not working? A football team has a scoreboard that provides immediate, albeit lagging, feedback. Does business today have a measurement system that provides them meaningful indicators of the success or failure of their strategy? And even if they do, one must determine if the measurement system achieves a balance between lagging and leading indicators. It must be linked to the drivers of the business, cascaded through the organization so it is meaningful to the entire company and finally, management must have the strength and commitment to follow through on altering the strategy in response to these indicators…follow through before market share and market capitalization suffer. NOT to respond is, well, insanity.