Roger Martin: evaluation

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Webflow. We're all friends here, so let's be real for a second. We all know that your website shouldn't be a static asset, it should be a dynamic part of your strategy that drives conversions. That's business 101. But here's a number for you, 54% of leaders say web updates take too long. That's over half of you listening right now. That's where Webflow comes in. Their visual first platform allows you to build, launch, and optimize webpages fast. That means you can set ambitious business goals and your site can rise to the challenge. Learn how teams like Dropbox, IDEO, and Orangetheory trust Webflow to achieve their most ambitious goals today, at Webflow.com. This episode is brought to you by Work os. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features, like SAML authentication, and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOs, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grained authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale, while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control, or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOs. It's a drop-in replacement for auth zero, and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at Workos.com to learn more. That's Workos.com. I just want to ask this broad question about strategy, why is strategy so hard? Why are so many people bad at strategy? Perhaps the thing that makes it intellectually hardest is that it is an integrative activity. It answers to a bunch of questions that have to fit together and reinforce one another. So, that just makes it a little more complicated, it's not like saying, Lenny, what do you want for lunch? It's saying, Lenny, what kind of diet do you want that'll keep you healthy? And that includes breakfast, lunch, dinners, snacks, a whole bunch of other things that you got to fit together. So, it makes that harder to do intellectually. Another aspect of it is, it is intimidating. Strategy involves making choices to do some things and not other things, and it is often intimidating to say, oh dear, I have to cut these things off, and not do them, and actually make a decision that I'll be held accountable for potentially, or I'll even hold myself accountable for. So, that's a second thing. It's harder emotionally, not harder intellectually. And then, there's the training aspect of it, the knowledge aspect of it, which is, what's taught now in strategy in business schools generally sucks. It's gone on a crazy theoretical bend, the strategy academy as a whole has fallen in love with a theory called the resource-based theory of the firm, that silly and nobody uses it out in the world. And so, students are no longer trained on useful strategy. And the other feeder into people learning strategy were the strategy consulting firms, but the strategy consulting firms, the so-called strategy consulting firms, do almost no strategy anymore because it's a little business compared to post-merger integration, digital transformation, and a bunch of other things. So, people aren't prepared educationally for it, and if they're not prepared educationally for it, then they sure don't get prepared for it in companies. It's intellectually challenging and it's emotionally intimidating. On this point, you made about how schools are teaching strategy wrong, how do you describe what the wrong approach is?…

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