Strategy: no strategy!

Our whole professional life we have always heard that you need a strategy, you have to make a strategy, you should always look for strategies.

We, iManagementBrazil, also have to deal with this in our projects. Those who know us from our projects, read our blogs regularly, watch our videos from time to time, know that we make a sharp distinction between strategy and tactics. 

The somewhat special company

In our more than 17 years in the market, we also come across a type of company that cultivates a completely different view of things. These are the companies that defined as their "strategy" not to have a strategy and not to want to make one. 

This type of companies, entrepreneurs as well as their executives, are probably the most interesting cases we have ever worked on. Interesting because they require the most enormous intellectual effort to immerse oneself in this world.

They are not disorganized companies - true, quite the opposite!

They are not companies with massive financial problems - true, quite the contrary.

Nor are they companies that need iManagementBrazil for reorganizations or restructurings - quite the contrary!

All these cases, which we could work on during our time, were without exception projects of business model transformation. Also, in these projects we were always only involved as project managers and sparing partners. 

If you tell business partners or other managers of third companies about such cases, in 8 out of 10 cases you get the same reaction: a slight smug smile, a slight shake of the head, and then a hint that we have once again landed one of those chaotic cases as a project.

But what did we really observe? 

The absence of a strategy has in no way been synonymous with the failure of the organization, as many third parties always assume. It can already be observed very clearly that the deliberate absence of a strategy encourages the organization to be more flexible.

There is no question that organizations with tight control, where formalized procedures are highly valued and whose continuity is passionately championed, tend to lose their capacity for experimentation and renewal. This is also why reorganizations and, in some cases, restructurings are so common among these companies. These companies also find it decidedly difficult to set up business model transformations as projects. Loss of control as the main source of fear is the decisive braking factor. 

Highly interesting is the behavior of the management of companies with the strategy "no strategy" in the planning phases of budgets and rather short-term oriented tactics in sales, production, purchasing, etc.. Management is constantly sending unmistakable signals not to indulge in resource-devouring ceremonies such as voting meetings. The use of collaboration tools for coordination is remarkably high in this type of company. The assumption is that you simply don't need meetings to agree on facts that everyone knows anyway. 

Special managers

There is also a tendency to reject formal planning systems and instead focus on consistency of action at all levels of the organization. This requires a very different kind of leader, mostly similar to the professionals we know from startups in the early seed phase. 

There is no written strategic plan, few written goals reduced to the minimum and never mission statements. In all these cases, the absence of the elements presupposed by a strategy serves as a symbol of the no-frills, non-bureaucratic organization. 

When recruiters ("headhunters") are called to such companies to fill vacant management positions, they often have considerable problems at the beginning to determine the profiles and to present appropriate candidates. Especially in these companies of "no strategy" it is not a matter of simply finding another candidate, or of finding out from the competitor, who has always done the same job and functions exactly as a job description specifies. In these cases, the HR consultant must know the internal dynamics very well, be able to read patterns in cooperation and information flow, and be able to profile the client's employees in dynamic cooperation. 

Is this possible? No.

But it is exactly this kind of a new recruiting approach that will emerge as a success factor in increasingly turbulent times. We believe that HR consultants will have to make significant transformational efforts of their own.

The murmur in the organization

The lack of a strict pattern for strategic decision making in the companies "no strategy" causes that a certain "murmur" is maintained in the internal systems of the organization. One can also put it very positively: the communication channels are permanently open and not closed by hierarchies. Thus, flexibility is maintained at a high level.

Possibly, these companies are the best prepared economic units for constant learning and the necessary adaptation.