Built The Crutch.

Transcript context

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I wanted to zoom back in on something very tactical. So say you're a product manager listening to this that has to write a strategy for their team. Say it's like they're working on the onboarding experience of their product and they're about to sit down and start to write out the strategy for their team. And say they have a general idea of what they want to do. Do you have any advice for just how to lay out a strategy? As you talk I think of there's a section. Diagnosis, a section. Guiding principles, a section. Actions, and then there's power in there and the guiding policy. Is that how you lay it out? Do you have any advice for how to write this out? I wrote the crutch because I felt that. The Crux because I felt that that kernel was not sufficiently sharp enough for peak. And even in The Crux, if I could rewrite The Crux book, I would, maybe, write it a little differently today, a whole couple of things I would change. First, it's really important to understand the challenge, the problem. Diagnosis is not merely understanding the world, it's understanding the challenge you face. What makes it hard? So the question I ask client is exactly that. What makes it hard? Client will tell me, "Oh, we want to open up business in Australia. It's a market we haven't tapped." And I'll say, "Okay, so why are you and I talking about that? You're the CEO. Just tell somebody to do it. What makes it hard?" "Oh, well, we don't know anybody in Australia and they kicked us out." If you push, he'll tell you why it's hard. But that understanding hasn't been percolated into a strategy. Part of the problem is that the concept of strategy has been so beaten up by thousands, hundreds of books, and thousands of more websites that people have a hard time trying to figure out how to create a strategy, because they're drawn up, down, left, right. So my two pieces of advice, anybody that's actually trying to do this is, A, state the problem, and, B, don't call it a strategy, call it an action agenda, that you're not creating a strategy, you're creating an action agenda. What are we going to do about this problem? That's essence of what you're doing. When you're thinking strategically, you're recognizing the problem and you have an action agenda to deal with it. It's not five years out and 10 years out. It's not your general mission to build a better world, it's none of that. All of that is a different literature form. There's huge numbers of people out there willing to sell you advice on how your mission, and your vision, and your values, and all these things that have to be in place before you can have a strategy. And that's not true. It's a different model. I start now with ambitions because people want to put ambitions in place. They get angry with me. I don't allow them to talk about their ambitions. So we start with ambitions, and okay, you have all these ambitions. I write in The Crux that when I was 25, I wanted to be a top business school professor. I wanted to be on Fortune directors. I wanted to drive a Morgan Drophead Plus 4. I wanted to climb the great mountains of the world. I wanted to learn to fly an aircraft. I wanted to marry a beautiful woman and have successful children. I wanted to have a townhouse on the [inaudible 01:00:00] of Paris. All and all, I had a lot of ambitions. That's not strategy. We all have ambitions, and every company should have ambitions. If we look at all those ambitions, and let's say I'm 25 years old, well, what's keeping me from reaching them all? "Well, I'm not ready to join Fortune directors. I'm not experienced enough." Okay, so I put that over here. "I can't afford the pen." I'm 25 years old, well, what's keeping me from reaching them all? "Well, I'm not ready to join Fortune directors. I'm not experienced enough." Okay, so I put that over here. "I can't afford the pen." Okay, put it over here. "How about the ambitions that you have any chance of making progress?" So now, well, beautiful woman. "Yeah, I don't know any, maybe I ought to meet a few." "Well, you can do something about that." So which of your ambitions can you begin to make progress towards reaching, and what's holding you back? What are the barriers? What are the problems? So I approach the question of the problem now through the filter of the ambition, that these ambitions, fine, let's accept them all, and which one can you actually make some progress on today? And what's making that hard? What are the challenges? So you're choosing a challenge. You're choosing, of the possible challenges you could face up to, you can't do them all. So there's a focus thing. You're choosing which challenge to focus on, and that challenge has to be, A, important, and, B, it has to be achievable. It has to be something that you can address. It has to be an addressable challenge. And so the search for an action agenda, I'm not calling it a strategy, is this balance between problems that are important because they're close to your ambition and problems that you can actually address and do something about. And that overlap then becomes the choice you make. "Okay, we're going to go after this and here's the action steps we're going to take to do that." And if it's a big company, the action steps may extend over two or three years. Smaller company, took [inaudible 01:02:32] year, six months to a year. These are things we're going to do, not goals we're going to achieve. These are things we're going to do, action steps. That's sort of the way I put it together today, which is slightly different than the way it's put together in The Crux.…

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