Attack of the Platitudinous Nothingburgers

 

When addressing the topic of strategic initiative management, it seems that one of the first and most aggrieved victims is the English language itself. The very term has multiple meanings. According to Dictionary.com,

• “Strategic” has six definitions,
• “Initiative” has eight, and
• “Management” has four,

…meaning that the term “strategic initiative management” can have up to 224 precise, but slightly different, definitions. So, what are we talking about here?

Meanwhile, Back At Madison Avenue…

A common marketing ploy is to coin a “posinon,” a contraction of a positive inferential non-statement. When I was a kid, the Coca-Cola Corporation had an advertising campaign that stated “Coke is it!” Later, another ad series asserted of Coca-Cola that “it’s the real thing.” Denotatively, of course, these sentences are devoid of meaning. However, their connotations were powerful enough to drive consumers towards, well, “the real thing.” Similarly, much of what passes for managerial insights into how strategic initiative management ought to be handled gets light on denotation, but heavy on implied, axiomatic truisms.

Let’s start with BusinessDictionary’s definition of “strategic management:”

"The systematic analysis of the factors associated with customers and competitors (the external environment) and the organization itself (the internal environment) to provide the basis for maintaining optimum management practices. The objective of strategic management is to achieve better alignment of corporate policies and strategic priorities."[i]

And Just Like That, It’s In Our Camp

I read this five times and I’m still not sure exactly what they’re talking about. By “factors” I assume they mean data, or information, but again I’m not sure. There are legions of analysts working for Wall Street firms, known as “quants,” whose sole purpose in business is to identify “factors associated with customers” in order to tease out some sort of pattern or structure, but they are (generally speaking) not involved in strategic management as much as they seek the optimal investing tactic in the near-term. And, as a reminder from last week, there’s a significant difference between strategy and tactics. Then there’s the whole business about “maintaining optimum management practices.” What practices are those? Ask fifty consultants (or bloggers), and you’ll get fifty different answers (though, one would hope, ones that are a bit less inchoate). I can guar—on—tee that your accountant will have a very different idea of which management practices are “optimum” than the person who runs your PMO. And what of “better alignment of corporate policies and strategic priorities.”? What does this “alignment” look like? Because I can assure my readers that, even in the most structured organizations, some of the decisions that affect the entire organization will be inconsistent with others. Does the organization put a premium on attracting the best available talent? Only if they fit into the existing pay structure. But it’s the rare organization indeed that, having identified some individual that they perceive to be highly desirous, won’t make an “exception” to their pay structure if need be. That’s just the way viable companies and organizations work, even if it means that the corporate policies and strategic priorities are out of “alignment.”

I’ve Seen This Before

I actually witnessed one of the most glaring examples of this kind of fuzzy “best practices” theory roll-out first-hand. I was at a professional society’s conference where a presenter was describing his team’s version of a capability maturity model. He told the assembled attendees that they had “designed the model to allow you to go where you wanted to go.” He wasn’t talking about an off-road vehicle – he was talking about a structured approach to strategic management, albeit in a highly vague manner. What if I want my organization to perform strategic management – whatever that may be – in a manner superior to my competitors? Would this presenter’s model “allow” me to “go” there? If so, how, exactly?

But the amorphous nature of the assertions in this arena do not seem to tamp down the fervor with which they are presented. The person insisting “It’s all about leadership!” is likely to do a massive eye-roll should you challenge them by asking “what about payroll? If it really is ‘all about leadership,’ as you say, how do members of the organization get paid? Does their ‘leader’ perform this function, as well?”

To Sum Up

Hatfield’s Rule of Management #5 states that if you can't state your theory in clear and unambiguous terms, it's probably a poorly-thought-out theory. But strategic initiative management theorists, take heart! There is actually a cohesive, articulable structure to address superior strategic initiative management ideas, which I’ll cover in my next blog.

[i] Retrieved from BusinessDictionary.com, http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/strategic-management.html, October 7, 2016, 17:50 MDT.