The assessment of strategic depth

One of the required traits for a senior leader is an ability to craft and execute strategy. In his book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt describes how the task of the corporate leader is closely linked to the design and execution of good strategy. Strategy in his view is not a goal or a wish, but the outcome of an in-depth and straightforward appraisal of the problems and the challenges of a company, a process that culminates in where, why and how a series of actions should be taken. The result of such appraisal inevitably leads to a choice of specific action and focus that excludes alternatives and allocates resources to the action underlying strategic execution.

He drives the point convincingly home what strategy is not, or what defines bad strategy:

1. Fluff: using esoteric concepts and unnecessarily abstruse words to create the illusion of high-level thinking.
2.  Failure to face the challenge: when one cannot define a challenge, a strategy to deal with it cannot be evaluated.
3.  Mistaking goals for strategy: statements of desire are not plans for overcoming obstacle
4. Bad strategic objectives: they are bad when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable.

   At its root, bad strategy reflects an inability to think clearly and to make sound choices based on analysis. Wishful thinking is not a substitute for careful analysis.  Shared visions of success cannot be the basis of strategy, says Rumelt, because “all analysis starts with the consideration of what may happen, including unwelcome events. I would not care to fly in an airplane designed by people who focused only on an image of a flying airplane and never considered models of failure.” Regarding vision and mission statements, Rumelt finds that they represent a “class of verbiage [that] is the mutant offspring of charismatic leadership. In reality, these are the flat-footed attempts of organization men to turn the magic of personal charisma into a bureaucratic concept —charisma-in-a-can.

Good strategy will apply focused power, and is only visible through a subtle change in perspective. Focus also implies the ability to say no, and avoid compromise. It therefore requires 3 things:  

1. a diagnosis that defines the challenge.
2. a guiding policy for dealing with the challenge.
3. a set of coherent actions designed to carry out that policy.

Assessing strategic depth of candidates requires therefore, naturally, a knowledge by the consultant of the industry he is recruiting for, combined with an understanding of what strategy is and what it is not. Personally look for the ability to reframe a significant business problem through a perception shift, on which subsequently a coherent series of actions is defined and executed. A good assessment of strategic depth hence is also tied to the maturity and intellectual depth of the search consultant himself.