Playing To Win
Stop Working for Loser Strategists
Life Really is Too Short
I was triggered — just a bit — in podcast this week. I was asked, as I often am, about advice for a younger businessperson working for a boss who is an incompetent strategist. Inspired by that podcast question, this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) argues that you should Stop Working for Loser Strategists: Life Really is Too Short. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
The Podcast in Question
It was one of the many podcasts with young hosts that I agree to do because I enjoy talking to younger people about strategy. I talk to plenty of older CEOs in my work, so these podcasts provide a nice balance. The hosts have lots of questions and I hope that I provide some wisdom that contributes to their development.
In these podcasts — including this one — I extol the virtues of having a strong strategy — because bad things happen if you have a weak, incoherent one. In response, the hosts almost always ask me a question about what to do as a more junior person who is on the receiving end of a such a strategy. It always goes something like this: “What if I am in a job in which I know the whole company above me (or sometimes it is personalized to their direct boss) doesn’t have a coherent strategy, and no one above is interested in hearing from me on strategy?”
There are always a couple of undercurrents to the question. The first is a little dig at me for being naïve about what it is like to be in the lower-middle of an organization. Don’t I understand that they are powerless to do anything? The second is a plea for sympathy. Don’t you see how hard it is for us; how much we are suffering?
Yet another question with the same questions behind the question in this podcast was enough to convince me to write about it.
My Response & Its Logic
I never take the bait on either the naivety or sympathy fronts. Instead, I just tell them to quit and get another job. Since they are worried about not having permission to alter strategy, the good news is that they don’t need any sort of permission from the company or their boss to quit. It’s not indentured servitude!
In response, they typically double down on both the naivety and sympathy vectors: “Oh yeah, you think it is easy to get a better job because you are famous and old. I don’t have all those options.”
But I still don’t bite. I double-down on my advice. Quit!
My logic is the following. The absence of a coherent strategy makes it impossible to tell, in advance, whether any decision is good, bad or indifferent. So, if your company (or, closer to you, your boss) doesn’t have a coherent strategy, you won’t be able to tell until it is too late whether all your hard work ads or subtracts value. Many times, in the wake of a decision that produces a terrible outcome, observers ask: “What were those idiots thinking?” I strenuously object to the ‘idiots’ characterization. Chances are that those involved in making the decision weren’t idiots. They were probably both smart and hardworking. But they just had no strategy. And when you have no strategy, anything and everything can seem like a wise choice at the time. That is why we see so many choices that, ex post, seem to make no sense.
That having been said, as I always say, strategy can’t be perfect. Sometimes even a well-considered strategy produces a bad outcome. Those bad outcomes are not a result of ‘idiot’ thinking, either. They are a result of the inability of any human to predict the future accurately. The best strategy can do for you is improve your odds of success.
However, when you don’t have a coherent strategy, bad outcomes are likely to happen routinely because actions without coherent strategy are essentially random. They seem like a good thing at the time because there aren’t logical criteria against which to evaluate them.
Living in the Kill Zone
That is why I think of the organizational triangle of workers (and the work they do) that lies below a non-strategist as a ‘kill zone’ — a dark zone that is inhospitable to happy productive work. There is no guidance for thinking usefully in the kill zone. Work in that zone is basically a waste of time and effort. Clearly the higher up the organization the position of the loser strategist, the bigger the magnitude of kill zone. For example, if the CEO is a non-strategist, the entire organization is a kill zone. It is sad to see, but it happens all the time.
That situation is most obvious to me when a board chair contacts me to tell me the company’s CEO doesn’t have a useful strategy and is unlikely to produce one because of lack of competence in or familiarity with strategy and asks me to help the CEO. This happens routinely and did a little over a year ago. A chair of a very large company, who had been a client of mine at one company prior to becoming a CEO and then again when he served as CEO of another company, had diagnosed that the CEO of the company for which he served as chair was struggling with strategy. He asked me to meet with the CEO and I agreed to do so.
We had several meetings during which the CEO explained to me that he had a lot of ‘execution’ on his plate and wanted to return to the question of strategy at some indeterminate time in the future when he had time — and of course never did. Strategically-incompetent CEOs have many excuses for not putting effort against strategy — all of them self-defeating. But the biggest reason is that since they don’t know what strategy is, they don’t see any real reason why they should spend time on it. It is true annoyance to them when a chair badgers them about it, but they have well-developed methods for thwarting their chairs — as was the case here. By the way, since the inception of that set of useless and annoying conversation, the company’s stock is down 25% while the S&P 500 is up 20% — even with all the recent turbulence.
These are 100% kill zone companies. All dark, all the time.
But even if the CEO has a coherent strategy, many managers below can create their own kill zones. It can be an executive with a bigger responsibility (as on the right above) or a manager with a smaller one (as on the left). It is a danger in every company. Every strategic CEO must work diligently to identify and eliminate kill zones in the organization below.
The Two-Year Rule
My rule is that you should limit yourself to no more than a maximum of two years working in a kill zone job. We have around 50 years in our careers. If we stay in a kill zone job for, say, five-years we will have frittered away a tenth of our whole career. That is just too much. Wasting 4% of our career is plenty bad enough.
So, try for two years — and try very hard. Be strategic under you. Even if the strategy above you is incoherent, decide what you are going to try to accomplish in the triangle underneath you and manage to that. At least you will get some practice at strategy. Do your best to demonstrate to your boss that you know what you are talking about, even if your boss doesn’t.
And try to help your boss with strategy. Some dreadful strategists are open to influence. But most (like the CEO above) aren’t — or they probably wouldn’t still be a dreadful strategist. But it is worth a try. My experience is that it is really rewarding when I can help a weak strategist get better. But the person has to want it — not deny the need.
Net, within two years, it either has to get meaningfully better, or you need to get out.
Practitioner Insights
My beloved late academic mentor Chris Argyris admonished me to avoid providing advice that will comfort recipients if that advice is actually bad for them. Telling the folks posing this question that I don’t understand their situation is untrue and sympathizing with them is unhelpful — even if doing both almost certainly would make them feel warm and fuzzy.
Instead, my advice to them and all readers is for you to take responsibility for your own career and set high standards. Try as hard as you can in your current job. But don’t fool yourself. Bad strategy triumphs in the end. It creates untold destruction — wasted time, wasted resources, wasted investments. Get out of the kill zone before you waste a big chunk of your career in it. While the grass elsewhere most certainly will not always be greener, there is nothing that is less green than a kill zone.
