Myth No. 1: Every CEO is a strategist. It is true that most CEOs are strategically minded, but many are not big picture strategist. Their job is to maintain the balance between winning today (operations) and winning tomorrow (innovation) plus developing talents and building capabilities for the future. That alone is more than a full time job. That's why CEOs hire strategy consultants and people like me have always been the secret services equivalent for CEOs.
Myth No. 2: Strategy is a competitive exercise. Half-right for this one. As much as it a competitive exercise to maintain market leadership, it is even more important to what disruptions are coming your way and how to deal with them. It is crucial for any business (more so for technology-based and time-based competition) to see what new value curves that organizations have blind-sighted due to corporate inertia.
Myth No 3: Every MBA is a strategist. 100% wrong for this one. In my experience (which I've hired over 500+ MBAs over the years) MBA school have provide good business fundamentals, they don't make everyone a strategist. I have seen many MFAs that think more like strategists. Strategy has nothing to be with business schools, well, a little bit.
As an economist by training, I find this is probably the most relevant discipline to strategy development. The infusion of industrial economics concepts has been powering strategy for years, providing considerable rigor and substance to business strategy. Understanding industry structure and source of market power are key to strategy but over emphasis of that create a new problem, which is the larger sense of purpose for a business and its reason to exist in the world.
Purpose is really the heart of any business strategy and should provide the guiding principle for corporate strategy (and brand). A business must have a clear purpose and with then comes a direction. A business without a purpose is like a flight without a destination. If purpose is not there, executives and front line managers will not be able to make the right trade-offs. What's a purpose? It is what a company's reason to exist and what the people deeply believe in. It is also something that makes the company truly distinctive. And guide how much they are willing to compromise. It is like soul-searching sometimes, but a company needs a soul too (although many function without one). This one requires more than the left-brain thinking of MBAs and also the left-brian thinking of a creative artist. It is a human endeavor in the deepest sense of the term.
For many once great companies, the founder usually have a clear (sometimes unarticuated) purpose. As the company grows and professional managers take on the day-to-day running of the company, somehow that is lost. So there's a need to re-create these purposes. Purpose is crucial because of its scope and ubiquity. It is large, much larger than any other elements in a business model. One can argue you cannot have a business model innovation without re-create the purpose.
Creating purpose is much harder than creating a strategy. There is no textbook for it. It is much more involving. It is a choice to pursue your destiny--the ultimate destination for yourself and the organization you and your partners founded... It draws equally upon your emotional commitment and intellectual whole--it calls upon everything you are (you training, your life experience and your very core)…everything you've experienced and everything you believe in.
