"Strategy is dead" RIP, and long live AGILE strategy!

Last week, the Wall St. Journal featured an article saying “Strategic Plans Lose Favor” with larger companies (read).

The article reports that companies like Home Depot, Spartan Motors, and (surprisingly!) Accenture think “Strategy, as we knew it, is dead.”

I say “Rest in peace!” -- for the sort of strategic planning that Accenture has specialized in, and that most larger companies have practiced.

Strategic planning can be, and has been, a massively analytical undertaking. Large consulting firms, like Accenture, can spend months of effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an exquisitely detailed strategic plan based on massive analysis. Sometimes they’ll deliver it in nice leather binders so it looks great on the executives’ bookshelves.

In an economy with lots of surprises, such strategic plans can be obsolete before they’re printed.

One manufacturing company spent months developing a plan to achieve ambitious growth over a 3-year period. Within the first 2 quarters, sales dried up and they went into survival mode. As for the strategic plan? “Well, we haven’t looked at it in quite a while.”

So does that mean that strategic planning is dead, killed by the accelerating pace of change?

By no means! But the analytical behemoths may go extinct, while more agile approaches will flourish.

To be useful in turbulent and difficult times, strategic plans need to be flexible and adaptive, open to rapid learning from the environment.

If a strategic plan is not agile, it’s dead, worthless, money very poorly spent for “SPOTS” (Strategic Plan On The Shelf).

So how can a strategic plan be agile? See my next blog.