Where I live it is common to have slab foundations (How to Build a Slab Foundation) for homes.

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.

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.

Every year, I visit my friend the optometrist. One thing that I can count on is answering a lot of black and white questions as I stare through various lenses. You know the routine. Is this one better? Or, is this one better? Over and over again the black and white decision is required. This is how my doctor narrows down the choices about which lens will provide the best correction for each of my eyes. That way, he will know precisely what eye glass prescription that I should have.

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?

Consultants and managers like to talk about grand strategies to win in business. They spend time and money to meet together to craft the best possible expressions of the purpose of the business, the vision for the future and the major steps along the way toward that future. They gather in retreats to make advancements.

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.