Strategy Does Not Exist
Here’s something I think about business. I think that the word “strategy” gets over-used a lot and that, while there are choices that exist that might be construed as strategic in nature, it basically does not exist.
Business is about getting paid to solve problems for other people and make things easier for them. And to be able to do that, over time, easier and more efficiently so that you can get better and better at solving those specific problems and, therefore, can make more and more money.
The big game plan that you might call your “strategy” essentially boils down to your ability to figure out which problems to solve and then figure out how to solve them. Many people call that process “tactics”.
My experience is that strategy is really the aggregation of all your tactics.
And that your tactics are defined by your ability to listen to the marketplace, solve the problem that the market is telling you to solve, and course correct over time as you understand what’s working and not working. And typically your “strategy” is mostly just explaining what you’ve already done and why it worked, in retrospect, without actually conveying the ability to accurately predict the future, read the tea leaves and explain where you and your mates will be in 12 to 18 months.
Strategy, therefore, is mostly a backwards looking narrative to make yourself feel good.
I think the biggest strategic decision you can make, that is truly strategic, is picking your market. That’s something that’s not just about solving a tactical problem. That is, indeed, about making sure that you’re solving problems in an area where a) there is a real problem (not an invented one like “semantic search” or the” real-time web”) b) people have shown a willingness and ability to pay for solutions and c) the number of those people, for whatever reason, seems to be growing not shrinking. You pick the wrong combination of those factors (like starting a record label right now) and it will require either a radically new approach or you’ll fail.
But assuming you are picking an area where those factors align, that’s about as much strategy as you need. At least until your market stops growing.
The rest of strategy, in my opinion, is solving the problem right in front of you as often as possible.
Strategy then becomes a word with a subtly different meaning. It then means being able to understand what is the problem that is right in front of you. That’s pretty hard. And that requires a diligent, tenacious approach to problem solving. But I’m not sure it requires a lot of high-falutin’ thinking. What it really requires, like much in life, is to do the next right thing. In a business context, that typically means “follow the money.”
That’s all.
The rest of strategy is an excuse to make business school kids with no real world experience feel smart and important without having to do any actual work like picking up the phone and selling something to someone. But I’m not bitter. I’m just saying.
The problem with new music ventures is that, while there are a lot of people that are listening to music, their willingness to pay for it has declined substantially. And the only thing that matters is whether people, somewhere along the value chain, are going to open up their wallets and shell out ducats or ‘pieces of eight’ for something related to music. And, so far, nobody is proving that. Until they do, there’s nothing to talk about.
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Monte Krause
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theflyingchange
