Thinking Strategically: High Level View

I’m still having issues with my internet connection, so we’ll see how far I get today with this post.

While my internet was completely down and before someone came out to fix it, which unfortunately took a while, I read a lot of books. A lot of books.

So, I’m going to talk a little bit about one of them.

The book was HBR Guide to Thinking Strategically. This book did not talk about Michael Porter’s 5 forces of strategy or any of the type of things the “C” suite might be talking about. Instead, the book was geared toward those working the trenches and maybe needing to think strategically in order to progress (or have been told to think strategically). It addresses the daily work and how to think more strategically in everyday terms rather than “C” suite terms.

Some of the sections found in the book are:

• Be strategic in your daily work
• Understand your organization’s strategy
• Develop a big picture perspective
• Align decisions with strategic objectives
• Set priorities and manage trade-offs
• Align your team around strategic goals
• Move from thinking strategically to executing the strategy
• Navigate strategic thinking challenges.

The book delineates the specific personality traits of those successful in strategic thinking:

• Curiosity – Curious about what is going on in your unit, company, industry, and wider business environment.
• Consistency – You strive to meet goals and persist in pursuing those goals.
• Agility – You are able to shift and adapt new approaches and ideas when new information calls to do so.
• Future focus – You are constantly scanning the horizon to see what new threats or opportunities are looming ahead and try to place yourself ahead of the event.
• Outward focus – You look for and identify trends in your industry and understand the implications. You also are open to asking for feedback from others outside of your company.
• Openness – You welcome new ideas from others around you, including colleagues and employees.
• Breadth – You constantly work to broaden your knowledge to enable you to connect the dots and patterns across different fields of knowledge.
• Questioning – You are constantly asking yourself if you are doing the right thing, if what you are doing is adding value, or should you change your approach.

All of these are really traits that enable you to take a big picture view rather than stay in the weeds (as finance professionals are prone to do) and also designed to orient you towards the future so you can capture early the value of any impending opportunities.

I wonder if these personality traits are also good for innovation? It kind of does.

The first chapter outlines six skills you need to develop in order to think strategically and navigate the unknown and provides ways on developing those skills.

• Ability to anticipate – you need to be able to anticipate changes in the environment or changes in the future. You will need to develop broader networks, so finance professionals are going to need to work with those outside of finance to understand what is happening.
• Ability to challenge – you will need to be comfortable challenging the status quo, digging deep into assumptions to make sure you have the right facts and assumptions. I think finance are already pretty good at this. They just need to get out of the automatic “no” and really work on understanding all sides, not just theirs.
• Ability to interpret – here’s where the ability to ask questions and dig into the data comes into play. You need to be able to zoom in and zoom out. Finance needs to work on the big picture aspect; they are well trained to focus on the details, but they may miss the forest view.
• Ability to decide – you need to be able to decide in the face of incomplete data, but you will need to ask for options instead of “the right” answer. Consider both the short term and the long term.
• Ability to learn – You need to be able to learn from successes and failures and get comfortable with failures.
• Ability to align – you will need to develop communication skills to help align your team or stakeholders with your (or company’s) strategic goals. This is constant communications and trust building to get the major players to support your goals.

There’s a lot in that first chapter that I want to write it down as a way of processing that information, especially on improving each of those 6 skills.

I think I will stop here and leave the topic at a high level and do other posts on specific topics such as big picture thinking, zoom in/zoom out, spotting trends, etc. I want to write in more details about those topics as a way of letting those ideas sink into my brain.

This also will also me to create more posts! 😉