On the other hand, the vulnerabilities in business have never been clearer to you. Many good people that you know are out of work and suffering. You have dodged the bullet so far but you know that your company needs to do better. If the company does not win, your job may be the next to go. You remember a time, not so long ago, when ambition and possibilities motivated you more than fear. You enjoyed that time. It was a time of hard competition but winning, not just surviving, dominated your thinking.

It is time to think about winning again. It is time to take the measure of the competitors left standing and to attack. It is time to put together strategies that comprehend the market realities, accentuate your company’s strengths and exploit your competitors’ weaknesses.

How will you do all of that?

You need information. You need to know what has changed. You need to know how you can react and respond to the new market situations better than your competitors.

There are many sources of good information – your contacts, trade journals, news reports and websites. Everyone has access to such things. However, you will not find what you need to complete your strategic analysis, clarify the new vision or inspire and align your team there.

Those things come from a competitive view customized for your concerns and culture. The customized view builds models that you understand because you helped to build them. Your team understands the models because they challenged them in multiple debates and discussions. Finally, you own the outcomes because you processed the information and feel confident about the meanings.

It is possible that you have everything that you need to complete the process. Check yourself – do you have these things?

• An updated summary of the market trends (e.g., technology, demographic, product)
• A complete summary of key competitors and their strategies (e.g. M&A, financial, product development)
• A current list of key unanswered competitor questions
• A product line map showing competitive segments and competitor products
• A gaps analysis process intended to identify, track and close key competitive gaps
• A process to meaningfully involve you teams in competitive intelligence activities
• A regular way to measure strategy effectiveness based on known and likely competitor moves

This list can include many more items. All of them address a key aspect of understanding the competitive environment so that better winning strategies can be developed and deployed.

Maybe it is time for you to engage with competitive intelligence in a more professional manner. Perhaps the environment has improved just enough to consider that “winning” is the best goal again for you and your company.

If so, then look for a competitive intelligence professional that can help you get the information, create the models, process the information and formulate effective winning strategies.

Competitive intelligence can help you now.

Most of the time, you have to focus on the concrete. There is not time to think fancifully or speculatively about the future. Taking your eye off the ball means that something could slip and that would result in many unhappy people. You take pride in avoiding such disappointments. You are reliable, conscientious and inclined to precision.

Still, you are not oblivious to what is happening in the world and among your competitors. Their engineering organizations are trying to beat yours. Some of the things that they do are outstanding. Their technology bets are sometimes different from yours. Product teardowns have given you insight into their product architecture and there are things to admire. You wonder if you doing everything that needs to be done to win. What should you be learning and changing to stay in front? How would you know?

It is a balancing act. Keep the processes humming while surveying the competitive landscape occasionally to understand where and how to improve. It would be great to have help with this. Perhaps Competitive Intelligence could help. Here are some possibilities.

• Understand the technology strategies. You have your own assessment of the critical technologies for your product space. It makes sense to you but you recognize that other smart people are making different choices for good reasons. Sometimes the reasons are due to a different development cultures or product priorities. On the other hand, sometimes competitors are investing to create or integrate capabilities that will help them pass you in the market. Competitive Intelligence maps the key technology choices and capabilities of competitors including their innovations.
• Map the architectural decisions. When you examine competitor products, you look past the obvious to understand the underlying architectural choices. The subsystem designs, interface mechanisms and industry standards employed signal something about your competitors’ intentions and capabilities. The architectural decisions also tell you much about their future flexibility. Competitive Intelligence organizes information about competitors’ product architectures and how those architectures affect future products and capabilities.
• Benchmark the processes. Part of your responsibilities is tracking your internal success metrics. Assessing where and how to improve is a priority. There are measurements for quality, on time delivery, R&D efficiency and so on. Over time, improving these measures gives your company significant advantages. The advantages are multiplied when your performance clearly exceeds competitors’ performance. Competitive Intelligence builds multi-dimensional comparisons of operational processes and their effectiveness.
• Track the people. Nothing works well without high trained and motivated people. Much of your time is assembling and aligning the right set of people to implement the company’s strategies. Meanwhile, your competitors are after some of the same people. Of course, their plans for future products are often evident because of who they are attempting to hire. Certain skill sets are becoming more important while others are declining in importance. Competitive Intelligence tracks competitors’ hiring plans and helps interpret the meaning of people related actions.
• Judge the capabilities. Your team has a record of accomplishment of what they can produce over time. Many times Marketing or management will ask you about future possibilities because of competitive pressures. They fundamentally want to know how your team’s capabilities compare to those of key competitors. Having that comparison, enables you and the company to properly make judgments about future options. Competitive Intelligence creates models of overall performance over time at each competitor.

Most the time, attention to what is happening inside the company and, particularly, your engineering organization consumes your energy and attention. Nevertheless, you did not advance to a leadership position by ignoring the competitive threats. With just a little information, you know that your team can match or exceed what any of the competitors are doing. The right set of competitive intelligence activities can supply that information to you. It is time to get started.

What does skin color and social background have to do with strategic or tactical thinking?

Only the recognition that the world is dominated by tactical thinking and a strategist will always be in the minority. “Minority thinking” means that most of the time the strategists must adapt to the tacticians rather than the inverse. It does not mean however that strategists are less valuable or needed. And it does not mean that strategy is unimportant. But a strategist that only masters strategic thinking without understanding how to act tactically will most likely fail (or at best succeed sporadically).

The critical implication is that a strategist has a particular requirement to speak two languages. First, there is the native language of strategy. Second, there is the foreign language of the majority that is primarily tactical.

Say something strategic to most tactical people and it would be like a Kenyan saying something in Swahili to me. Aside from “hakuna matata” (no worries) and a few other phrases, I would be lost. Similarly, when strategy encounters a tactical mindset, the strategist faces the likely outcome that they will be misunderstood unless they follow some simple rules.

Here are 5 powerful rules that can help guide a strategist’s behavior and translate their message.

1. Don’t start by calling “it” strategy. Whatever your thoughts are, whatever beautiful concepts you have developed and whatever your vision may be, just don’t call it strategy. At least at the beginning, just say you are “working out a plan” or “working through an example.” Why say it this way? Because “plan” and “example” sound and feel more definite. They are concrete steps or evidence and most people will latch on to this. Hooking them by helping them understand how to be involved is much more important than the label.
2. Don’t expect appreciation. A good strategy is a beautiful thing. It considers so many factors, distills lessons and makes meaningful bets about the future. You and I can admire when this is done well. Just don’t be surprised when the tactical majority doesn’t value the elegant thinking so much. Most people focus on tasks and it is a good thing that they do. If all the “real” work had to be done by strategic thinkers, most companies would fold due to inadequate output. The best “appreciation” that you can receive from most people is their implicit endorsement of your work and increasing understanding of how it applies to them.
3. Do determine the “choke” point. If someone puts too much food in their mouth, they start to choke. Likewise, if a strategist talks about too many concepts or projects too far into the future, tactical people begin to choke. Different people have different thresholds. Our task is to be careful to know and respect those thresholds. For instance, some people can only imagine what will happen over the next six months. If someone attempts to force them to think about a 2-3 year horizon, they figuratively begin to choke. Don’t go too far too soon or you will lose your tactical friends.
4. Do practice a fait accompli methods. One method of rolling out strategy is to form a high level team, make a grand announcement and launch a comprehensive communications campaign. This happens all of the time and usually results in failure because it doesn’t take into account the essential tactical mindset of organizations. More than that, most people have seen such campaigns come and go. Wisely, they wait for the latest one to pass while maneuvering to avoid serious impact to their work. On the other hand, people do respect results, genuine change and courageous leadership. Thus, a strategist is best served not by announcements but by sustained modeling (both personal and organizational). Then, as the good results become increasingly known, tactical people are motivated to become part of the strategy.
5. Do understand the difficulty of change. Some strategies call for “more of the same.” Most, however, require change and that affects many people. Change causes all sorts of conscious and unconscious reactions. Many of the negative reactions arise because change feels “unsafe.” Unsurprising, unsafe people are not enthusiastic about change. The sooner that a strategic thinker grasps this and masters the safety issues, the sooner that their effectiveness will increase. Understanding safety issues will give you much greater sensitivity to the implementation challenges of strategy. And, it will lower the temperature in your discussions with tactical people. They might actually come to believe that you value them as much as the grand strategy ideas that you have worked so diligently to formulate.

Sometimes it seems that tactical people are averse to understanding strategic people. I suppose that it could easily be said that strategic people feel misunderstood and underappreciated by the tactical world. My view (as someone that purports to think strategically) is that the obligation to bridge the gap belongs primarily to the strategists. Fortunately, this can be done by thinking strategically but acting tactically.

Do you agree? Are there other lessons that you have learned like these?

There are three lessons that are significant.

1. It is possible to anticipate the need for certain tools. When that is the case, it is best to get them as soon as possible. For example, every homeowner (or mechanic) needs a hammer. Everyone needs an assortment of screwdrivers. Everyone needs a saw of some sort. A person should master these common tools because they are useful in solving many problems.

In competitive intelligence, it is also true that there are common tools that should be identified and acquired early. Although you don’t have to have all of these tools on day one, it is useful to know that you will need them. Here is a partial list by category of some tools that you will likely need.

• Presentation Preparation (e.g., PowerPoint, Impress)
• Basic Analytics (e.g., Excel, Bissantz SparkLines,
• Financials Comparisons (e.g. Yahoo Finance)
• Earnings Calls Summaries (e.g. Thompson, SeekingAlpha )
• Basic Meeting/Facilitation (e.g., whiteboards, poster charts, easels, markers, laser pointer)
• Collaboration (e.g. website, SharePoint, Groove)
• Database (e.g., Access, MySQL)
• News Collection (e.g. RSS clients – Snarfer)
• Organization Charting (e.g., OrgChart Plus)
• Newsletter Creation (e.g., Microsoft Word, Publisher)
• Website Creation/Editing (e.g., Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression)

Notice that I did not include a complete all-in-one tools suite from a competitive intelligence software vendor. There may come a day when you need exactly that type of product but it is not this day when you are just assembling your competitive intelligence effort. In my opinion, you are far better served starting (mostly) with tools that you already have and trying to accomplish the tasks manually. This way you learn firsthand about what is important to you and your customers before attempting to justify, acquire and deploy a major system.

2. Think of key people as “tools.” They are tools in the sense that they help you accomplish your competitive intelligence tasks. Indeed, The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence series is all about how people affect and enable competitive intelligence. Sometimes they will help you with the specific problem. Other times they will provide supplemental information. Perhaps they will direct you to others when they cannot help you directly. Finally, it is a simple truth that often they will have specific expertise or organizational credibility that you lack. Thus, it is a great advantage to identify these key people (at least by function) quickly so that you can begin establishing quid pro quo relationships. After all, they will want something from you (and, when you do CI well, you will have something of great value for them) too. Here are the functional categories where you need to know someone.

• Legal (to provide review and guidance on sensitive issues)
• Ethics (sometimes provided by Legal people, to provide and explain standards for conduct)
• Financial (to perform detailed analyses and interpretations, also to make comparisons with internal financial results)
• Marketing Communication (to observe and track competitor’s external communication and messaging)
• Senior Management Mentor (to give you perspective on how senior management thinks and what they value)
• Internal Analysts (to answer questions and provide interpretations of information)
• External Analysts (to exchange understandings and studies for the industry and specific competitors)
• IT Support (to assist in implementing systems that can be widely used in the organization)
• External Process Networks (to help understand new methods and tools for competitive intelligence)

3. You won’t always have what you need. Don’t panic because someone probably has the tool (or knows the person) that you need. The most useful attitude that I have found is to assume that the solution can be found and then to orient my search accordingly. That is, I expect to find just the right tool for my problem. When I do, I promptly add it to my tool bag for future use. Even better, the confidence that I gain by finding and then mastering the use of a new tool to solve a difficult problem makes my value greater as a competitive intelligence professional. Remember when we introduced the brand for this new CI function? Part of the personal branding is that you become known as a proficient problem solver.

My friend completed repairing his riding lawnmower for 20% of the cost that he would have paid to someone else to do the work. He acquired and used a new tool. He added to his tool box for future projects. His confidence about solving mechanical problems has grown. Altogether, this was a successful project for him.

In a similar manner, it is time for you to begin the same process as you begin executing competitive intelligence functions regularly. Accumulating the tools, mastering their use and solving problems will become your mantra. Good luck!

Next topic is “Back to the Vision”.

Here are the 15 steps that we are walking through. Which ones do you think are especially important?

The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence

1. Find The Pain
2. Get The Job
3. Tease The Vision
4. Frame The Foundation
5. Setting Some Standards
6. Introduce The Brand
7. Accumulate The Tools
8. Back To The Vision
9. Secure The Budget
10. Build The Presence
11. Expand the Brand
12. Go For the Value
13. Recruit A Staff
14. Go On The Offense
15. Evangelize The Mission

Slab foundations are solid blocks of poured concrete on top of which the structure is erected. There are several important characteristics that a slab foundation must have in order to support the house that is being built.

• It must be shaped correctly for the house. It is costly and difficult to alter the basic shape after it hardens.

• Although it looks like a solid mass of concrete, it actually conceals a great deal of infrastructure including electrical conduits, plumbing and cables (which provide strength).

• Everything attached to or embedded in the foundation must be in the right place (again, it is hard to change things fixed in concrete). For example, the plumbing for sewage should emerge where the bathrooms are planned to be.
• Finally, after doing all of the necessary things, it is important to preserve your flexibility for all of the remaining elements of the home. For instance, the placement of the second story wall for the guest bedroom is not to be tied to something in the design of the foundation.

The foundation serves its purpose even though it is not a visible feature of the home. The structure above obscures what is beneath it and many people give little thought to what they don’t see. However, you absolutely must pay attention to your CI foundation. And the quiet time after your first management presentation is a good time to establish what will support all that you do later.

Skip the foundational work, however, and the compliments will quickly be replaced with sympathies for the expensive rework that will be required. After the sympathy, you will start to hear the whispered questions about how could someone forget the foundation?! This can cause damage to your prestige and credibility. It’s embarrassing, expensive and (this is the good news) avoidable.

So where are we in our journey to create a competitive intelligence function?

You have taken the initiative to build a competitive intelligence function. Spotting a “pain” (step 1) you approached a senior manager to offer your services (step 2). They are interested! Show me something they say and off you went to respond. Since you are just starting, you know that you cannot provide the ultimate benefit immediately. Making virtue out of necessity, you figure out how to provide some value and, more importantly, you whet the appetite of your senior leader by giving them a tease (step 3) of what could be done. The meeting is a success and you are pretty sure that you will be doing more CI work for the senior leader. You have some time to reflect about what to do next

The next step is to frame the foundation for all that is to come. There are three things to do to make sure that your foundation is what is needed for long term success.

1. Create the Blueprint

This is where you begin to imagine what the full vision for the CI function will be. One thing for sure is that it will be customized to your environment. That is, it will be constructed to meet the needs of the people of the organization. Like an architect does before designing a home, you will begin asking people about what their hopes are for competitive intelligence. How do they like to get information? What are the critical times for receiving intelligence? What do they already have or know? When and why have they been disappointed in the past? All of the answers help you to identify how to construct the program. They will suggest the mechanisms for delivering information, the schedules that make the most sense, the sensitivities to avoid and the dreams that the leaders have for their success.

Don’t make this too hard. Simply talk to people and record their responses. List the concrete responses to what they have told you. In most organizations, common culture and experiences will help you because the responses will cluster so that you can focus on a smaller number of items. Note that you are not implementing all of this now. You are simply making plans so that what you do in the near term will not preclude something important that comes later.

2. Establish Your Principles

Make sure that you know what is important. These are your principles that are relevant throughout the lifetime of a CI function. Among the many reasons that principles are important is the simple fact of pressure. As you become known for your CI contributions, you will begin to feel great pressure. The pressure to produce valuable interpretations will exist, of course. You will also be confronted by other pressures such as ethical issues (“can we use this information that I got from a former employee?”), shortcuts (“we don’t have time to double check our sources”) and misuse (“it just needs to look pretty, I don’t care what it says”). Here are some principles to consider.

• I will always focus on value to senior leaders and the business strategies. This doesn’t mean that others won’t benefit but it does establish priorities.
• I will conduct myself according to a code of ethics (see the SCIP code of ethics). Now is a good time to identify who can give you legal support as issues arise.
• I will properly and consistently characterize (e.g., assumptions, facts, speculation, recommendations) the content that I provide. This establishes and maintains your credibility.
• I will orient all I do toward helping effect positive change. A CI function implicitly challenges what is happening inside your company as you analyze the competitive environment.
• I will always remember that people (i.e., leaders, colleagues, others) matter most. People are the source of the best information, they are required to support and accept competitive intelligence and all change comes through the efforts of people.

3. Make Broad, Fruitful Relationships Possible

This may seem redundant. And, it is.

Your success or failure will be based on your personal relationships. This may seem counterintuitive in the age of complex information systems, databases, web searches, analytical tools and academic research. All of these things have a place but in absence of a robust foundation of relationships, your failure is more likely than not. Here is a partial list of relationships that will be critical. You need to begin now thinking about how to nurture each set of people.

• Sponsoring management/leaders – do you understand their needs?
• Other managers – who owns what strategies and might be overly sensitive to what you are doing?
• Peers – how can you provide value to them so that they willingly contribute information and reflection?
• Sources – how can trust and reciprocal value be established?
• Support – how can you get their help to build the information infrastructure and provide other (e.g., legal) services

Three steps for framing a solid foundation – blueprint, principles and relationships.

Next topic is “Establish Some Standards” because just doing the work is not enough.

Here are the 15 steps that we are walking through. Does it seem like a lot to do?

The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence

1. Find The Pain
2. Get The Job
3. Tease The Vision
4. Frame The Foundation
5. Setting Some Standards
6. Introduce The Brand
7. Accumulate The Tools
8. Back To The Vision
9. Secure The Budget
10. Build The Presence
11. Expand the Brand
12. Go For the Value
13. Recruit A Staff
14. Go On The Offense
15. Evangelize The Mission

Congratulations!

If you have gotten this far then you already spotted an important need for competitive intelligence, identified a senior leader that cares about it and managed to get the assignment to address the need. Even better than that, you worked into the discussion the topic “competitive intelligence.” Whether or not it really registered with your leader could be debated. They may have simply been glad to offload a difficult subject to a willing soul. Their expectations are low (and you should have tried to set them that way) but you have started toward a vision that will now become clearer soon.

More importantly, you have begun to set a people oriented tempo to your work.

You are recognizing (or at least hoping) that competitive intelligence will touch important areas for leaders in the company. CI analyses will show how well competitors are doing and sometimes how poorly your company is performing.

Meanwhile, leaders and peers are invested in how things are going. They set in place strategies that they think will be effective. And your work will eventually help them be more successful. However, that time is in the future. Between now and then is a minefield of egos, insecurities, turf wars, differing philosophies and more. Don’t worry too much, you can get through it. I’ll help you.

What’s next in our slow march to introduce a successful competitive intelligence program into the organization?

You tease them.

There is more than one meaning for “tease.” Sometimes I tease my children in a humorous way. I am trying to be funny and share a laugh with them. This isn’t what I would do in the office. Rather, a “tease” there is more like a small bite of an appetizer that is fine when tasted but provokes an even stronger desire for what might be coming. The small bite makes you lust for a full meal.

Why tease the leader in your response? There are two reasons.

First, you aren’t ready to serve them a “full meal” of competitive intelligence. The full meal definition will become more apparent as we continue our discussion. Suffice to say that when you only have an appetizer, then you feature the appetizer. Remember that your leader does not expect much so one especially good serving of anything will probably delight them. Don’t overpromise.

Second, even if you have everything ready (e.g., comprehensive information, immaculate presentation, credible strategic recommendations, solid quantitative and qualitative backup, etc.), it will not be accepted by an unsuspecting leader. They simply are not likely to be ready and you will actually damage your credibility if you attempt to “force feed” them. Don’t over deliver.

Here is what is in the “tease”

You goal is to begin establishing a pattern that will characterize all of the competitive intelligence things that are to come. The pattern will eventually lay the foundation for your personal competitive intelligence brand. (There are more things in the foundation but some are very important to start early.)

Here are three things to tease your leader

Do these steps well and you may just earn another bigger competitive intelligence assignment.

1. You will state the problem using their language and their measurements of success.

Why? Because you want to be known as someone that attempts to understand the larger problem from the leader’s perspective. It is possible that you won’t get this exactly right the first time. However, the attempt will be noticed and if it leads to discussion, your standing will increase in the leader’s eyes.

Assuming that you are presenting information in a slide format, a practical way to do this is make the first slide a summary of the key question and the success metric for the business.

2. You will demonstrate superior collaborative skills.

How? You will do this by showing that you talked to other key people about the topic. Sounds simple and some people assume that this goes on all the time. The all too common problem is that it doesn’t. You will be different. You will canvas people on all sides of the topic, inside and outside the company. Their feedback (even their dissent) will be included and credited in your presentation. You will be the honest broker of information.

A simple approach is to include a list of contributors on the title slide. Also, at key points in your presentation, you can point out who provided key inputs. Aside from showing how you collaborate, you want to indirectly stroke those that helped. You’ll need them later.

3. You will show evidence of interpretation.

Many people will focus on the “what” question. That is, what is happening? The answer is presented exhaustively as a set of facts. That good as far as it goes but a senior leader has way too much “what“ information and precious little “so what” interpretations. Again, you will be different. You will try to give the meaning to the information that you have uncovered.

Expect that there will be discussions and disagreements with your meanings (this is actually a very successful outcome). Your bona fides have not been established yet. Nonetheless, simply trying will make you stand out.

There is so much more to do. That’s why the three steps that I have outlined are only a tease.

You might decide on three different steps for your tease. Whatever you decide, the important concept is to preview what is to come, to introduce new things in ways that are easily accepted and engage your leader in such a way that they will ask for more.

It is worthwhile to sketch all of the other things that will guide you over the next few months. That’s a more complete foundation than the simple tease. That’s the menu for the full meal. Ah, I can almost smell it now.

Next topic is “Frame the Foundation”.

Here are the 15 steps that we are walking through. Do you see something that is missing?

The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence

1. Find The Pain
2. Get The Job
3. Tease The Vision
4. Frame The Foundation
5. Setting Some Standards
6. Introduce The Brand
7. Accumulate The Tools
8. Back To The Vision
9. Secure The Budget
10. Build The Presence
11. Expand the Brand
12. Go For the Value
13. Recruit A Staff
14. Go On The Offense
15. Evangelize The Mission

Are black and white questions the best type of questions for business strategists?

The virtue of a black and white question is that the answer is succinct and distinct. There isn’t debate about whether we should develop a new product since the answer is “yes” or “no.” We don’t endlessly wonder about entering a new market because we can get a concrete answer quickly. New trends are less worrisome because we decide simply whether they will happen or they won’t. Nice. Tidy. Quick. And dangerously simple.

Strategy is best dealt with in grayscales

A grayscale implies that there are gradients. Gradients, in turn, imply that the future is blend of influences. Intuitively we recognize that this is true at work. Seldom do major decisions get made with a simple yes or no. There are debates, arguments, counter proposals and reflection. After much gnashing of teeth, an answer finally emerges. The effective strategist eschews the simplicity of black and white thinking and chooses to live in the gray zone. How is this done?

Banking on “it depends”

My graduate school professor once told me that the right answer to any complicated question is “it depends.” Amazingly, as I have practiced this in my work life, these two words often served to silence those that were trying to trap me into black and white thinking. My opponents retreated to attack another day when I might ignore the fact that life and strategy is complicated. (May their wait truly be long.)

Of course, the right retort would have been “it depends on what?” This is where a strategist makes money. For example, will mobile banking become a significant, consumer demanded service in the future? Snapshot answers (e.g., is it important today, will it be important in 2012) may be “yes” or “no”. More helpful are the answers which explain what has to be in place (e.g., technology, business models, competitive forces, etc.) for this type of service to be broadly available and seen as a differentiator in the market. This is less like a snapshot and more like a constantly changing movie. When all of the components of the “movie” are identified, then the strategist can make arguments, assemble evidence and track competitors with respect to those components.

Shift the question from “what” to “when”

Think for a moment about baseball. One of the hardest things to do in sports is to hit a baseball. It requires many skills including good hand-to-eye coordination, proper balance and superb eyesight. Still, the most important determinant of getting a good hit is timing. The batter has to time the arrival of the pitch (and its trajectory) with precision or else failure is almost certain. This is why pitchers (i.e., their competitors) are fundamentally trying to upset the batter’s timing. And, not surprisingly, the very best hitters fail almost seventy percent of the time.

Strategy is similar. It very often is about timing when a market will mature or when a specific product investment should be made. It’s about tracking the moves of competitors and understanding when their offerings will endanger your competitive position. It’s about using dynamic market feedback of all sorts to adjust the speed of responses and initiatives. (Sometimes we should go faster and sometimes we should go slower.) It’s about having a fine tuned sense of those critical dependencies and meshing them together (using models and other tools) in such a way that they can be viewed for discussion and debate.

Here are some reminders to get you to the strategist’s gray zone (and keep you there)

1.       Practice responding “it depends” to questions about the future

2.       Be ready to explain the dependencies

3.       Put things in place to monitor the dependencies over time as they change

4.       Create a model to show how the dependencies fit together and affect your business

5.       Regularly hypothesize possible competitive responses

My eye doctor can prescribe vision correction lenses. His methods work assuming that I actually wear the glasses that he prescribes. Though it may be counter intuitive at first, the strategist’s gray zone is actually much clearer and more valuable than the black and white world. Though it does not guarantee success, it does produce strategy that is richer and more effective than other mindsets.

Do you agree?

Meanwhile, in the rest of organization, people come and go to work each day. They often know little of what has been decided. Or, if they have received the pronouncements from on high, they selectively integrate what they consider important into their work plans.

So, how can you tell that the business strategy is working?

There are usual external measures of revenue, profit, market share and so on that are typically used to measure the effectiveness of strategy. These are critical measures, of course, but they are lagging indicators when a new strategy is introduced. Often the first measures of strategy effectiveness come from the internal organization.

What should a manager look for to understand if the strategy is working within the organization? Here are my five success indicators to monitor.

1. Managers are modeling the changes. At all levels, a new strategy implies change (otherwise it isn’t new). If management expects change to occur only because of announcements, then the strategy is unlikely to be effective. People are sensitive to strategy fads which come and go. However, they are similarly alert to real change in people.

2. Success measures are being understood. It is not enough to have a bright idea. At some point in time, the performance of the strategy must be measured and the measurement must be understood (and accepted) in the organization. People that understand the external measures begin to adapt the internal reward system accordingly.

3. Competing strategies are retired. The temptation for management and organizations is to retain the familiar. If a significant new strategy is introduced, a significant old strategy must be retired. Not only does this make sense to the larger organization (sensible behavior is important), it establishes the credibility of leaders to focus the organization.

4. Increasing focus on the future. A temperature reading of the organization will reveal that people are talking more about the future than the past. It should be no surprise that a backward focus is a drain on the organization’s energy. Befuddled leadership, ineffective strategies and risk aversion prevent an organization from solving tomorrow’s problems. A strategy starts to work when an organization is energized about what is possible to achieve.

5. It is becoming personal. The best leaders create bridges between their organization and the vision. People then make conscious decisions to move toward or away from the vision. A strategy’s effectiveness can be measured by the extent to which employees own it. Increasing ownership means increasing alignment with the vision, greater problem solving and broader participation. Simply put, people commit themselves by crossing the bridges.