For example, take the recent New York Times article, “Apple Buys Intrinsity, a Maker of Fast Chips” at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/technology/28apple.html, about Apple. Apple, flush with cash and the serial hits of the iPod, iPhone and iPad, purchased a chip design company. What does this mean? How does it fit with previous Apple moves? How does it confirm or change Apple’s perceived strategy? What might their next move be?

These questions are fundamental questions for someone competing with Apple and the core domain of competitive intelligence professionals.

To answer the questions, start with some background observations.

1. Apple processor choices are strategic decisions. Remember when Macs used Motorola (and then IBM) processors. As Intel processors began to outpace PowerPC in price/performance tradeoffs, Apple switched. The impact has been significant for Apple and its products. For the iPhone, Apple chose an ARM-based design (manufactured by Samsung). This was also strategic (but not differentiated) because the low power ARM architecture is the de facto standard for low powered, wireless devices.
2. Apple prefers to control design. Indeed, it is easy to argue that attention to design issues primarily differentiates Apple. This shows up in everything that Apple does from software to packaging. Related to design, Apple prefers a high degree of vertical integration. That control allows for specific performance and functional capabilities that are difficult for less integrated companies.
3. Apple has mastered media commerce. Starting with the iPod and music, now continuing with the iPhone (apps, video) and through to the iPad (eBooks), Apple uses the iTunes model to aggregate content, simplify the consumer experience and enable developers. Along the way, Apple takes its share of each transaction while driving sales of its own devices. The next logical expansion of selling ads to the captive Apple audience has already been announced.

What does all of this have to do with Intrinsity?

In 2008, Apple purchased PA Semiconductor. Even though PA Semiconductor specialized in PowerPC architectures, it was thought that Apple wanted their low power design expertise for future wireless device processors. Also in 2008, Apple purchased an architecture license from ARM. This meant that Apple has the rights to the internal design information for specific ARM cores and had the right to extend or modify those designs. (Others companies such as Texas Instruments and Qualcomm have architectural licenses for some ARM cores.)

Fast forward to 2010 when the new iPad included an Apple-labeled A4 processor. It all makes sense. The PA Semiconductor team must have designed an ARM based processor for Apple. (Technical Intelligence, Product Teardowns, M&A Activity)

The people familiar with Apple’s situation say that efforts to create a new chip for mobile devices from the ground up are stalling. In 2008, Apple purchased another chip maker, called PA Semi, for $278 million. That start-up also specialized in making fast, low-power chips.

But wait. Maybe all things are not well for the PA team at Apple. (Key People Tracking, M&A Activity, Competitor Strategy)

But a number of the PA Semi employees have left Apple — many of them disgruntled about their compensation, according to people with knowledge of the situation who were not authorized to speak publicly. Google, in fact, bought a start-up called Agnilux earlier this month filled with PA Semi engineers.

And how did outsiders first notice that Apple might be doing something new or different? (Key People Tracking, News Tracking, Primary Source Relationships)

Word of the acquisition began to leak out after technology trade publications noticed earlier this month that a number of Intrinsity employees had started to list Apple as their employer on the social networking Web site LinkedIn. Neither company, however, would discuss their relationship.

Now things get a little clearer and two things become apparent.

First, it is important to realize that although Apple has marketplace momentum and popularity, they are not infallible. It appears that they have the common difficulty of integrating acquired companies successfully into their strong culture. A strong counter move for its competitors is to attract the key leaders of the acquired companies. Who is good at doing this? Google. Google does many more acquisitions than Apple and has a more open culture.

Second, Apple has shown a willingness to spend money to increase its vertical integration in ways that similar companies do not. For instance, RIM, arguably Apple’s biggest smartphone competitor, does not have chip design capabilities. Buying Intrinsity means that their technology is no longer available to Apple competitors. Locking competitors out of performance enhancing technology gives Apple a competitive advantage. The Intrinsity resources also may mitigate the people moves from the PA Semiconductor group.

What is next?

Remembering that Apple is a media company, look for them to purchase companies that enhance media delivery or performance. For instance, a prime target for Apple would be the vendor of the graphics acceleration core in the A4. Acquiring Imagination Technologies would have a profound impact in the mobile space since many other semiconductor vendors rely on their accelerators. (Technology Trends, Early Warning, Scenario Analysis)

The story goes on and on. Apple, Google, RIM, Samsung, TI, Qualcomm and others are engaged in a fascinating commercial contest in the Wireless business. Each makes moves and the others counter. All have patterns, capabilities and limitations. Wrestling with each results (hopefully) in a winning formula.

Competitive intelligence is critical throughout the process. It helps weave a story through the seemingly random events over time. It helps explain what is happening, why it matters and what counter moves are possible. It helps leaders lessen surprises, gain confidence in decisions and get better results for their companies.

There were ways to get around all of this noise.

• You could take advantage of the times that the factory shut down. That removed all of the background noise. Unfortunately (if your goal was talking instead of production), this happened very infrequently.
• If you knew exactly who to talk to, you could move close to them and speak loudly. If you were the listener, the right strategy was to focus on the speaker’s words while ignoring the barrage of other sounds.
• If you wanted to “overhear” something, then the only recourse was to become involved in the conversation. That, of course, depended on the acquiescence of the other participants. Thus, you were unlikely to hear much of value accidently.

Conversely, some approaches would only make the problem worse.

• You would not want a goal of hearing everything that was being said in the factory. That would simply complicate the problem of separating an important conversation from the background machine noise. Lack of focus was a sure way to hear nothing of value.
• You would never want to amplify the sounds in the factory. Though this might increase the volume of the speaker’s voice, it would also increase the sounds from the machinery.
• You would not want to encourage people to whisper. Obviously, this made it harder to hear since the level of noise would overwhelm the conversation

Both of these lists could go on and on. They illustrate the common problem that we have of separating the important from the unimportant. The difficulty arises because every important communication is surrounded by background (i.e., contextually unimportant) noise. The world (much like the factory) is full of noise. What we want to hear is typically competing with so much that is unimportant (or less important). Furthermore, sometimes we want to “overhear” or discern things not originally meant for us. The background noise makes that task especially hard.

Thus, we get to the fundamental task in competitive intelligence. That is, targeting the signals that we desire to hear, decreasing the “volume” of the background noise and, finally, interpreting the important signals correctly.

Unfortunately, many CI organizations apparently follow a different strategy. That is, there is little strategizing about the right signals, the methods employed are often designed to amplify rather than mute noise and precious little time is spent on excellent interpretation.

Some people say that competitive intelligence is fundamentally about early warning. Seena Sharpe expands this to say it is also about forewarning. My sense is that it is those two things plus supporting effective business strategy decisions. That extension mates the predictive function of warning with the proactive improvement of business approaches and results. After all, what good is competitive intelligence if it does not affect the bottom line?

Okay, here are some thoughts about improving the signal to noise ratio for your competitive intelligence.

1. Check to see if you are intentionally identifying critical signals. A good early warning system process exists for exactly this purpose because its key recurring question is whether you are looking at the right things. Management will be involved in this process with the competitive intelligence team. Their shared question is this, “What is coming that might affect our business prospects or strategies and how can we know, as soon as possible, when it might occur?”
2. Make sure that you are not increasing the noise. In my opinion, there is a seductive risk for many in competitive intelligence. That seduction is the indiscriminate love of data and tools. Our world is awash with data and easy ways to get to it. However, when we disproportionally are attracted to accumulating data, enamored with presentation or convinced that data (alone) causes positive changes in strategies, we are increasing noise at the expense of important signals. Perhaps there should be a limit on data collection activities especially when the cost of collecting more information decreases the time for meaningful interpretations. Thus, the next thought.
3. Rebalance your activities to favor more and better interpretations. Data availability is rarely an issue. History is replete with examples where the information existed, it was known by decision makers and, yet, opponents were able to “spring” surprises. Think of Pearl Harbor when the United States already had broken many of the Japanese diplomatic codes and was reading their classified messages. A retrospective view showed that, due to the sensitivity of the information, no one reviewed the complete sequence and context of the decoded messages. (Avner Barnea recommended an excellent book to me on this subject – “Pearl Harbor – Warning and Decision”.) The Japanese strategy (and possible actions flowing from that strategy) disastrously was missed.  Consider the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Israeli intelligence knew a great deal about the Egyptians and Syrians war plans but did not choose to mobilize in time to repel the initial attacks. Why? In part, there were multiple misinterpretations of the preparations for war. An excellent book on this topic is “The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East”. This occurs frequently in business too. We accumulate hoards of readily available information using rapidly improving tools but poorly relate that information to strategy decisions. We present abundant data often yet seldom help decision-makers. Not a good combination when it is true.

There is much more to discuss about improving signal identification, decreasing noise and interpreting information better. As Stephen Covey says, begin with the end in mind. If the end is a more successful businesses, then improving strategies by helping strategy decision-makers requires better competitive intelligence signal-to-noise ratios.

The world is noisy. That is not news to anyone. Like the factory that I used to work in, the noise is indicative of activity. However, our challenge is to amplify and interpret the right signals so that others can make good use of the resulting insights.

The archetypical strategy story goes something like this …

“A small gathering of senior leaders is convened at a secluded site. The atmosphere is serious. An important decision is needed. Everyone there knows the competitors. They are attacking. Some of their attacks have been beaten back. As for the others, well, that is why the meeting is so urgent. The leader stands to speak. We must counterattack. Our stockholders and employees depend on our decisions. The organization must be aligned around a common strategy. What is that strategy to be? So many actions, priorities and resources must be congruent with it. It is time to act. Here is what we are going to do.”

When this scenario (or one like it) occurs, some days or weeks later various parts of the organization get their new assignments. Sales must target new customers. Perhaps their incentive programs are adjusted to reflect the new priorities. Marketing must adapt the product line messages to feature new attributes of the augmented product. Engineering must invest in different technologies to support new product features. Meanwhile, competitive intelligence gets new marching orders to track and report on new competitors and markets.

This is top-down strategy development. Sometimes this works spectacularly well.

Consider the case of Intel. As recounted in the book “Strategy is Destiny” by Robert Burgelman, Intel followed a top-down strategy process that, starting from the early 1980’s to about 1998, relentlessly focused the company on microprocessors. More specifically, Intel created, promoted and sold ever-increasing performance for the Intel Architecture instruction set. Because of their focus, scale and ecosystem (think of the WinTel “alliance”) of software developers, Intel reaped incredible profits. Within the organization, everything was subordinated to this mandate. Andy Grove and other executives explicitly understood and reinforced this top-down strategy. Because the strategy was dictated from the top, all supportive processes (including competitive intelligence) became similarly top-down in nature. As long as there was growth, profits and market share, this worked well.

Interestingly, despite the executive mandates, other businesses emerged from within Intel. Some will recall the RISC (the x86 is CISC) architecture and products (i860, i960 processors) that were produced for a few years. Andy Grove spoke about the strategic dilemma that this caused.

“We now had two very powerful chips that we were introducing at just about the same time: the 486, largely based on CISC technology and compatible with all the PC software, and the i860, based on RISC technology, which was very fast but compatible with nothing. We didn’t know what to do. So we introduced both, figuring we’d let the marketplace decide. … our equivocation caused our customers to wonder what Intel really stood for, the 486 or i860?”

Eventually the dilemma was resolved in favor of the CISC based x86 architecture product line.

However, another example from Intel points out the positive possibilities of emergent strategies. It involved the design and production of motherboards that contained the Intel microprocessors. At one time, partners primarily performed this task. Intel provided information to them and sold components. PC manufacturers bought the motherboards from Intel’s partners. As the processors became more complex and performance more critical, many of the partners could not design and build the motherboards that would highlight (and differentiate) the Intel microprocessors effectively. This was a threat to Intel because it meant that AMD and others could credibly market similar products. Within Intel, an unscripted response to this threat emerged. Simply, Intel began designing and manufacturing the motherboards. Though it started small and without a top-down strategy mandate, it became a significant business for Intel in the 1990’s.

What does all of this have to do with competitive intelligence?

Because competitive intelligence is a supportive strategy function, the structure and processes used by the competitive intelligence people often reflect the business strategies. That is, when strategies are well known, competitors are confidently identified and threats are well characterized, the competitive intelligence function is organized to reflect those realities. Its role is to reliably produce accurate information to help answer the fundamental question, “How do we continue to execute our successful strategy to maximize our results?” Commonly, the competitive intelligence team leans toward repeatable processes supported by comprehensive infrastructures to answer this question for strategy decision-makers. When a strategy is as successful as Intel’s, this is a valuable service to a company. However, few technologies companies have such sustained runs. Thus, a competitive intelligence function must consider more than what is well known or established within the company.

For instance, take the more common case where the strategy does not have a 15-year lifetime of enormous growth and profit. In those situations where strategy changes occur more often or competitive threats are less predictable, a top-down structure for competitive intelligence has some risks. The risks are evident when the top-down strategy prevents or discourages a balanced view of the competitive environment. You can observe this happening when assumptions about the environment prematurely harden or business model risks go unmonitored.  Sometimes the thought of disruptions (both opportunities and threats) may be devalued since this “distracts” from near term strategy execution.

What is the antidote? It is simply to balance the highly structured, top-down competitive intelligence efforts with an intentional focus on “emergent” competitive intelligence.

“Emergent” (bottoms-up) competitive intelligence is disruption focused, less structured and (somewhat) untied to the established business strategy for the company. It cannot be fully described ahead of time in the form of key questions. Instead, it refers more commonly to thematic threats in the competitive environment. It requires different thought processes. For example, rather than receiving questions from strategy leaders to direct activities, emergent competitive intelligence must identify new key questions and supply them to the strategy decision-makers. A key role of emergent competitive intelligence is to stimulate strategy refinement by supplying valuable and unanticipated competitive intelligence information.

Here are thoughts about doing emergent competitive intelligence effectively.

1. Reserve time, energy and resources. It is critical to get senior management agreement to spend time on emergent threats. One way to argue for this latitude is to assemble a set of case studies about how surprising developments have upset successful strategies. Both business and military history is replete with such examples.
2. Develop appropriate processes. Highly repetitive, structured processes solve important problems. However, looking for the unexpected requires processes that deal with more competitive noise because the sources are more diverse and the “signal” is, by definition, less well characterized. The right information filters are required.
3. Emphasize networks. Primary sources are important for all types of competitive intelligence. They are even more important for emergent competitive intelligence. Cultivating an effective network is often the only way to get early insight into the unexpected. The network must be constructed intentionally to be forward looking and early adopter oriented.
4. Activate the organization. The first network is within the organization. In my opinion, a successful competitive intelligence function involves more than a small team. Activating the organization means creating an early warning system that systematically attempts to identify, discuss and characterize competitive threats. Emergent competitive intelligence facilitates early warning systems and gives key contributors product ways to participate.
5. Tolerate higher risk. We are certain only about the past. However, some business results seem predictable based on momentum. Emergent competitive intelligence looks beyond the current momentum and that is why risk tolerance must increase. When the competitive intelligence team or management cannot accept this uncertainty, then they will forego potentially great advantages.

Emergent competitive intelligence complements “top-down strategy driven” competitive intelligence. A highly successful team balances the two perspectives. It uses different processes and tools to be effective for each perspective. When done well, an organization gains great benefits from both.

Do you find the description of “emergent competitive intelligence” applicable to your company or business?

Still, there weren’t many options for places to go. It was a given that sooner or later the good guys went there too.

So you might imagine going there with a friend. Ah, your friend. The paragon of truth and justice. A cowboy that was strong and good. He represented all that right about the world and that is exactly what made him a target. Others (the bad guys) could not prosper when he was there and they knew it.

As a friend, how would you prepare him for the saloon so that he could walk out alive?

There are 5 things that you might do.

1. Scout the saloon. You would survey who frequented the saloon, when the bad guys usually showed up and how the dynamics changed when they did.
2. Check the entrances and exits. This could be critical if a gunfight erupted. Knowing the design of the saloon building could come in quite handy if a quick escape or a different plan was required.
3. Chose the seating. Certain tables would be more or less vulnerable to attack. Usually the corner table was best because it gave the best vantage point. No one could come in behind your friend and all of the action would be in front of him.
4. Recruit some allies. It is rare that everyone would be against your friend. However it is possible that they would not be organized to help him. You would work on this ahead of when they were needed.
5. Give an early warning. The proverbial bad guys always announced their arrival and usually their intentions. The sooner the good guy knows that they will sooner enter the saloon, the better prepared he (and his allies) will be. You would be actively watching.

If you did these five things, your friend would have a lot of advantages. He would be ready to proactively respond to whatever came his way. It is more likely that his day would go well and that the bad guys malevolent intents would be thwarted.

Now change the terms to a present day situation. The “saloon” becomes the competitive environment. The “good guys” become your company or client. The “bad guys,” of course, are your competitors. The “entrances and exits” are your strategic options. The “seating” is your market or product position. The “allies” are your alliance partners and ecosystem. Finally, the “early warning” becomes your gap analysis process.

Our jobs in competitive intelligence are to help the “good guys” win against competitors. We orchestrate many things to proactively equip senior management with what they need to know about the environment, specific competitors and possible strategic options. Our jobs matter because few other functions have such a broad portfolio of tasks that affect the “safety” of the company in a dangerous competitive landscape.

Living and working in a competitive environment is not an option for most companies. There are competitors and dangers. There are outcomes which are harmful to our clients or companies. There are others that are aggressively pushing their agendas which will diminish the our prospects. Luckily we are far from helpless.

We fight back with “saloon lessons” to equip our management better.

May the good guys carry the day. Giddy up.

(See a video presentation on this topic by clicking here.)

So, we study and communicate the gaps and then we are done?

Nope. Identifying the known gaps (though not necessarily easy) is only the first step in a robust gap analysis process. Here are the 5 steps to comprehensively think through gaps, to create simple tracking methods and to ultimately get to the actions that will close the gaps.

1. Start with the “known” gaps.

“Known” gaps are the ones for which there is general agreement about their identity and significance. For instance, we may know that competitor X is about to introduce their new product which is 20% faster than any product that we have. Since there has been a press announcement, live demonstrations which seem to confirm the claims and an established track record for the competitor, we can firmly believe that the product and the claims for it are real. Furthermore, we know that our customers highly value performance. Hence, this is a gap that is well characterized and is significant to our competitive position.

To assemble a starting list of known gaps, solicit input from the management, business development, marketing and sales teams. For each gap that they identify, make sure that it is specific and well described, that the impact is estimated and each competitor which is better is noted.

There will be some of these gaps which cannot be fully described. These are the “potential” gaps.

2. Create a backlog of “potential” gaps.

“Potential” gaps do not meet the full criteria to be considered as known gaps. There may be information missing about the exact nature of the gap or its impact. Using the preceding example, if we hear that our competitor is introducing a “faster” product sometime in the future, we might conclude that this could be significant to us. However, it could make a large difference if it is 10% faster in three years or 50% faster in six months. Without more information, it is also very difficult to assess the potential significance of the gap. Still, knowing the competitor well may lead us to believe that “where there is smoke, there is fire.” The proper action is to keep track of the potential gap and to assign someone (e.g., the competitive intelligence function) to collect information about it. Then, when the uncertainty threshold is crossed and the evidence is more substantial, the potential gap can be escalated to a known gap status.

How do we look even further back in time to find things that lead to the potential gaps?

3. Make a list of triggers which may lead to gaps.

Triggers are not gaps. Instead, they are events, activities, announcements and such that may signal gaps in the future. Why are they important? They are important because companies rarely operate in a vacuum. Public companies, especially, signal much of what they plan to do through all types of disclosures. If we are attuned to these disclosures, we get hints of future strategic directions. Continuing the faster product example, it is entirely possible that the competitor had made patent filings years before the product was announced. They may have purchased the assets of another company with specific technology competencies. They may be actively making venture investments in small companies with complementary products. In an ongoing business, all of these types of triggers are predictable. A trigger list can serve to organize the monitoring of such triggers. Then, when several of them have “tripped”, it may be reasonable to investigate whether or not a competitive gap is imminent.

Triggers are often driven by broader forces in the market.

4. List the key trends which affect the market.

It starts to get a little fuzzier in this category. Nevertheless, tracking demographic, technology, product, legal and other areas is important. In technology, the broad trends of things getting smaller, faster, cheaper and more communicative is not a revelation to most people. More recently, the trends toward more social media, lowering energy consumption, increasing recycling features and more emerging market support are becoming important. The key to trend monitoring to find the ones that most affect customers (and, therefore, their buying decisions). After an important trend is identified, then it is critical to understand the rate at which the trend is being responded to in the market. The goal is to eventually identify the triggers (see step 3) which more concretely describe when and how competitors might gain some advantage.

How do we maintain all of this information? Simple. Create four spreadsheets and track the known gaps, potential gaps, triggers and trends. Last, establish action plans.

5. Assign actions for all areas.

Known Gaps

Assign each one to a person that must define and execute an action plan to close the gap. This usually must be a manager with sufficient authority and ability to work across organizations because all know gaps must be “significant.” Put another way, these are hard problems to solve but their resolution is critical to a company’s competitive position.

Potential Gaps

Assign these to the competitive intelligence function and require a periodic report to a responsible manager. The goal is to actively determine whether to demote the gap if it is insignificant or to escalate it when it can be fully characterized. The escalation process must be a part of a regular review cycle or it could become ineffective due to its irregular or inconsistent use.

Triggers

Assign these to the outward facing functions of your organization. These may be the business development or product marketing teams. Their responsibility is to look for the specific trigger information and feed it back to a coordinating competitive intelligence function. The CI team then coordinates the evaluation of the triggers and decides when a potential gap has been identified.

Trends

Assign these to the market research team and the technology team. Their mission is to help the organization understand when a trend accelerates to the point where there are specific, compelling market responses occurring. Once the responses are being seen, then triggers are identified for each competitor to understand how they intend to act.

Gap analysis can be a straightforward, organization energizing and fruitful process. The keys are to discriminate the different types of information, assign the responsibilities correctly for each and establish a process of regular review with management.

A more complete treatment of Gap Analysis can be found at http://tinyurl.com/yk8fcq6 or on my website at http://www.jthawes.com.

Even if you are not a chef by training, you know some things about cooking.

• First, you probably know that a lot of people cook but not many are masters. For instance, I count as cooking almost any time that I intentionally apply heat to raw food. There is not much nuance or sophistication to my definition (and you would rightly deduce that I am not a master chef). You probably wouldn’t want to eat many of the things that I have prepared but I can do some basic things well. Meanwhile, a master chef brings training, creativity and versatility to the kitchen.

• Second, cooking usually involves multiple ingredients. A proficient cook understand the purpose of each ingredient, when to add them and how much to add. Maybe they have a recipe to start with but they trust their judgment as the dish is being prepared. A little more salt, a little less butter they might decide along the way. A novice either ignores the recipe (and creates disasters) or slavishly adheres to a set of directions with no understanding of when or how to creatively deviate from the prescription.

• Third, and this is getting much more involved, a master cook understands that a meal is far more than the mixture of ingredients according to some recipe. Indeed, a meal includes the presentation of the food, the drink to accompany the meal, an artful display on the table and maybe some music for enjoyment. The “full meal” to the master is an encompassing sensory experience that is meant to satisfy those that partake. (A novice wonders why paper plates aren’t good enough for most meals.)

Strategy is similar to cooking.

• Almost anyone can claim to be a strategist for basic topics but not many are masters.

• Master strategists understand fundamentals and tools but know when to apply their intuition and experience to improve on both.

• An accomplished strategist provides a complete strategy which provides value at many levels to the organization.

Separate the “microwave strategists” from the master practitioners.

If you are in management, a primary task that you have is to distinguish between titles and capabilities. The title of “strategist” means little when you need to know if they can handle difficult assignments. Of course a microwave strategist (think of someone that handles simple assignments quickly) might be quite helpful for certain business topics (there are many “popcorn” topics in everyday business). However, they are not nearly as suitable for complex business strategy, competitive intelligence or early warning systems that make a difference to the company. In these cases, you have to look for the right kind of thinking (e.g. clear, integrative), specialized training and creativity in someone that has a strategic mindset. Everyone can be a type of strategist but only a few are suited for the complicated subjects of business.

Fundamentals first and then the important deviations.

The famous football coach of the Green Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi, said that football was “nothing more than blocking and tackling.” His point was that the fundamentals, consistently and effectively applied made the most difference in the outcome of a game. It’s worthwhile pointing out that his teams would have failed miserably if he really stopped with the fundamentals. They needed to have offensive and defensive plays that gave his team advantages. A strategist, like Coach Lombardi or any master chef, must know what is basic to the craft. However, the breakthrough value often comes from the intuitive leaps that signal a departure from the norm. In strategy work, this places a premium on the strategist’s ability to gather clues from the environment (much like a chef tastes the food as it is being prepared) to determine how to make adjustments to the basic tools. How do others understand the tools? How should an approach be customized for the various strategy audiences? When is it time to introduce or adapt a competitive model? These process deviations (or customizations) make the difference between simply completing a task and making an impactful change to the business.

The total strategy experience matters.

A confession is in order at this point. Many times in my career it seemed like the end point of a strategy effort was a gorgeous PowerPoint presentation impressively delivered to management. That’s it, I’m done I regularly exclaimed after some high level presentation. I was wrong.

When done effectively, strategy work engages the organization on many levels. First, it helps define a direction. Second, it signals how others will be involved in that direction. Third, it suggests steps along the way to the destination. Fourth, it may well include the external impacts on partners, suppliers and customers. Fifth, it equips the organization with the proper tools to implement and measure the strategy. Sixth, it includes new or refined definitions that become part of the lexicon. (See my blog entry “Grading Your Business Strategist” for more information.)

I can become a better cook (my family hopes this happens sooner rather than later). Maybe I can even earn the title of “chef” if I dedicate myself to learning and applying the craft. Until then, the kind of meals that I can reliably prepare will be the basic ones.

Your strategists may be of the microwave variety. They can handle what is simple and quick. Where they need help is in the “full meal” experience. See my complete set of articles at http://tomhawes.wordpress.com for many ideas about how to move them forward in their competencies.

Bon Appétit