Align the Strategy with What, Exactly?

 

From the Contradictory Proverbs[i] web page, a few examples:

a)      Look before you leap.

b)      He who hesitates is lost.

a)      You’re never too old to learn.

b)      You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

a)      Winners never quit.

b)      Quit while you’re ahead.

The web page’s list goes on and on, but you get the idea. So, who thinks that it’s at least possible that some of the management science theories that have been propagated and largely accepted over the past millennium are also only conditionally true, or even blatantly contradictory? Consider:

a)      Shareholder wealth is the appropriate goal of a business firm in a capitalist society.[ii]

b)      Make a customer, not a sale.[iii]

a)      The purpose of risk management is to identify potential problems before they occur so that risk-handling activities may be planned and invoked as needed across the life of the product or project to mitigate adverse impacts on achieving objectives.[iv]

b)      It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.[v]

In pursuing ProjectManagement.com’s theme for June, that of Strategic Alignment, by reviewing the current literature on the topic, there is, well, some silliness to wade through – so let’s get to it.

We’ll start with the most notorious category of management science that claims to produce critical information on an organization’s strategy selection but, in fact, is wholly inadequate for the role. That’s right, I’m talking about our friends, the accountants. The first set of contradictory proverbs in the second set illustrates pithily the difference in approach taken by the Asset Managers and Project Managers. Asset Management is largely predicated on the “maximize shareholder wealth” meme, as I have pointed out a few times in this blog. Conversely, Project Management is all about delivering the customers’ expected scope, within the customers’ time frame and budget.

While this means that PM theory is significantly closer to applicability in the Strategic Management world, the last pair of juxtaposed quotes represents a hint that we’re not quite there, either. Risk Management is big business, and considered in many quarters to be a key component of Project Management. But even if we PM-types concede the argument that some aspects of the project’s unfolding future can be captured and prepared for, there is no Gaussian-curve based technique that can possibly predict the behavior of the organization’s competitors, and performance against competitors is what Strategic Management is all about.

Soooo… with what, exactly, are we aligning our strategy? With popular but ultimately unsound, or even contradictory theories? Sadly, discussions of Strategic Management often devolve to such misalignment. In this month’s series, I hope to skewer some of these overreaching theories.