Strategy is about answering the question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” At Innovare Growth Solutions, whenever we ask executives of businesses, who are usually beyond middle age, this question, their backs go up without fail. They all, without exception, believe they are already “grown up”!
The notion that the business needs to be growing, but its executives are already grown up is a contradiction in terms. Simply, if the business goes from the state it is in today to another “grown up” state, surely those presiding over it need to have grown somewhat as well for them to competently preside over it? But this is a digression.
The important thing is that strategy is about growing. The only way that a business remains successful is if it continues to grow. The only way that a business will continue to grow is if it continues to ask the question: “What are we going to be when we grow up?” It is not a question that is asked once and the answer filed away for posterity. It needs to be asked and answered continuously, and by the whole organization. Indeed a business that thinks it is already “grown-up” would have no use for strategy. But the business that seeks to grow cannot but have a strategy to help it chart its growth path.
Strategy is not a once off thing. As the business plots its growth path, there are many circumstances and situations that will stand in its way. And these circumstances and situations, both internal and external, change continuously with time. Hence the business also needs to continually re-chart its path in the turbulent waters of competition, market dynamics, regulation and the requisite competences for success.
Indeed Teece and Pisano (1994) observed that “[d]eciding, under significant uncertainty about future states of the world, which long-term paths to commit to and when to change paths is the central strategic problem confronting the firm”.
