Stratanalyphobia
Rob May has a posting over at Businesspundit, on why so much strategy ends up being complete baloney. (I've swiped his graphic for my post, too!) His take on it:
"Stratanalyphobia" : The fear of doing any analytical work to justify your assertions about strategy.
Strategy meetings, Rob says, suffer from the following problems:
1. Everyone believes he/she is strong in strategy.
2. Everyone likes to talk about strategy because it is fun and easy.
3. The winning strategy comes from the person that can either make the best emotional appeal for their strategy, or concoct the best chain or faulty reasoning that sounds strong even though no data backs it up.
As a result of 1 and 2, it often takes forever to get to 3. Thus we get stratanalyphobia, a condition where no one wants to do any analysis, but would prefer to talk in circles and sound potentially smart.
The point, of course, is that strategy needs to be based on hard facts and substantiated assumptions; not just gut feel. On the other hand, as David Foster points out in a comment to Rob's posting, it is not much better to have research done but then to interpret the results simplistically. He provides a link to a posting about a few cases of market research gone hilariously haywire.
Comments, as always, are most welcome and may be posted below.
Rob, as often is the case, you speak for many of us. Strategic thinking is far too important to leave to gut feelings and to doing the fun and easy. Strategies are difficult to develop and even harder to launch and manage effectively. But for our business sake, we need to create annual strategic plans and do the hard work necessary to make them succeed.