Adventure of Strategy

This week, I am in Madrid and busy with a week long PhD residency that is being held at the Universidad Europea de Madrid. A fascinating experience, so far, given the diverse group of people participating both amongst the faculty and the doctoral students.

I am amongst the latter. A PhD, I have been asked by several people over the past few months? Don't I have enough, between a busy professional practice, a lovely wife and two kids, and life in general, to keep me amused? Yes, I do. But ...

I feel very strongly that the field of strategy is evolving right now into something quite fundamentally different to what many practitioners (in-house and consultants) are still using. Namely, the strategic planning model of the late 20th Century. It is now more than a decade since Henry Mintzberg wrote his seminal work, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, which I heartily recommend as essential reading for any strategist, yet the process is alive and well and living in law firms.

Strategic plans often fail to yield the results that firms need. This is quite evident from the results of research conducted by Edge International in 2006, which showed widespread failure in strategic planning in law firms. Many contemporary studies show that this is by now means limited to law firms. Other professional service firms and indeed industry at large is suffering equally from this malaise.

The new model of business strategy that will dominate the 21st Century is already here. It is to be found, in a form rapidly approaching adolescence, in the emerging concepts of military strategy and  the serious academic journals. Of course, it is also emerging in firms themselves where bright people, realizing that the existing models are flawed, are trying out new things by trial and error and, in many cases, achieving remarkable results. It is even to be seen in completely different fields that are not intuitively related to either business or strategy, but that have important concepts that influence both, such as emerging areas of physical science such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory.

(OK. For those that I have just freaked out, linking law firm strategy to quantum mechanics, I do apologise. Think of it as a metaphor or, if you're seriously interested, contact me and I'll walk you through it. It's actually not that difficult. My late physics teacher is probably completely bemused in his grave that I even know terms like quantum mechanics and chaos theory, given the marks that I achieved in his subject in high school!)

So ....

Something as fundamental as a sea-change in one's primary area of practice is not something to be approached lightly. Especially given that given the increasing business pressures of today and indeed the far greater diversity of those pressures too, my clients' continued economic competitiveness depends at least partly on my ability to help them navigate these new seas.

Which is why I enrolled for the PhD in Applied Management and Decision Science at Walden University at the beginning of this year. Appropriately enough, I have chosen the Leadership and Organizational Change area of specialization. Through to about 2010 or 2011, by which time I hope that both my quest and my PhD will be complete, I intend to use these studies as a platform for drawing together what is emerging in theory on the one hand, and the realities of everyday life in law firms on the other. At stake, in fact, is no less than a new theory of strategy. After all, theories are meant to reflect realities at the practical level, not vice versa. That is the very essence of a science: that its theories are "falsifiable" when they disconnect from empirical observation.

I spent a while today talking with one of my fellow students, an officer in the US Marine Corps, about the nexus between the latest doctrines that they apply in the battlespace, and business strategy. Quite fascinating. I had an equally brief but rewarding discussion with an organizational psychologist yesterday, about how her area of research intersected with strategy. The quality of the knowledge gleaned from just these two conversations bodes well for the likelihood of success!

To be frank, though, I am not overly interested in theory for theory's sake. Everything needs to feed back to what is directly applicable and valuable at the practical level. My (and my family's) sacrifice of time and money in a PhD is not intended primarily to enlarge the academic body of knowledge. Rather, it is to generate solutions to one of the most pressing problems facing firms today:

"How do we maintain a business that is sustainably profitable over time and that meets the aspirations of the firm's owners, while the market changes rapidly around us and our firms evolve within, both often unpredictably and in ways that place us under intense pressure?"

This is one of the things that made me choose Walden over the half dozen other business schools with distance learning PhD programmes that I investigated both in Europe and the USA. Their programme is focused intensely on high quality research that is applicable in everyday life, rather than resident in the academic stratosphere. I was also impressed by their teaching model (almost all the actual coursework involved is done online) and the fact that the my research can focus right from inception on what I want to do and not what will progress my PhD supervisor's career, as is the case with so many universities.