Your Strategy Is Not What You Say It Is
Or, where you allocate your resources says a lot about you
👋 Hey there! Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! My name is Abhishek. I read a lot of books, think a lot of things, and this is where I dump my notes and (so called) learnings. I mostly write to educate my future self, but if you like what you read here, I would say this hobby of mine just became a bit more purposeful. Now… time for the mandatory plug!
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Enough talk! On to this week’s essay. It’s about 1,450 words.
Q: How do I make sure I’m actually working on the things that matter?
Through most of the 1990s, after Steve Jobs had been forced out, Apple’s ability to deliver the fantastic products it had become renowned for simply stopped.
Without Jobs’s discipline at the company, a big gap began to emerge between Apple’s intended strategy and its actual one — and Apple began to flounder.
For example, Apple’s attempt to create a next-generation operating system to compete with Microsoft’s Windows during the mid-nineties — codenamed Copland — slipped numerous times.
Though it was claimed to be a priority for the company, Apple just couldn’t seem to deliver it. Management kept telling everyone — press, employees, and shareholders — how important it was, but nothing moved.
Within the company, there was no cohesion between what senior management was promising to the market and what was actually prioritised within teams. For example, engineers were assigned to work on other projects, solve existing issues, or dream up new ideas that had nothing to do with Copland.
Without Jobs, teams were able to get away with spending their time on ideas they were excited about, regardless of whether they matched the company’s goals.
Eventually, Ellen Hancock, Apple’s CTO at the time, scrapped Copland altogether — recommending the company buy something else instead.
The problem was fundamental. What Apple wanted didn’t add up with what they prioritised. It’s a kind of “innocent hypocrisy” that lot of us — both individuals and businesses — engage in.
Today, let’s talk about strategy. More specifically, let’s talk about why most of us like to think that they have a strategy but in reality, they are just fooling themselves.
When you were in your teens and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, anything seemed possible. Cricketer. Astronaut. Geologist. Sherlock Holmes. Traveller. Prime Minister. Your answers were guided simply by what you thought would make you happy. There were no limits.
As the years went by, you allowed your dreams to be peeled away. You picked your jobs for the wrong reasons and then your settled for them. You began to accept that it’s not realistic to do something you truly love for a living.
Too many of us who start down the path of compromise will never make it back. But they are not ready to accept that they have made a compromise. They consider it only a temporary arrangement — a calculated detour before following their life’s calling. Life isn’t only about following one’s dream after all. One has to be realistic as well.
“I’m getting a lot of experience here,” says a guy working at Infosys, while he actually wanted to build a business of his own. “Another degree would look good on my résumé,” says a girl who’s getting a master’s degree instead of following her dream of working for the government.
You can talk all you want about having a strategy to reach your goals while balancing aspirations with reality. But ultimately, this means nothing if you do not align those with where you actually expend your time, talent, and energy.
In other words, how you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road.
Real strategy — in companies and in our lives — is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about where you spend your resources. As you’re living your life from day to day, the only way you can make sure you’re heading in the right direction is by watching where your resources flow.
Suppose you say family is important to you, yet you spend most of your time at work — to make money, provide for your family, have a better future, or whatever…spending time with family isn’t part of your strategy to live a good life. Or, in cruder words, family isn’t a priority for you. Your actual strategy is to focus on your career.
If you really want to solve your user’s problems, but are chasing faux KPIs to impress investors and board members, your customers aren’t really your priority. Your actual strategy to grow the business is to impress your board.
At a basic level, a strategy is what you want to achieve and how you will get there. For example, you have intentions for your career. Against those intentions, opportunities and situations will emerge that you may not have anticipated. How you allocate your resources — your time, talent, and energy — is how you’ll determine the actual strategy of your life.
If how you allocate your resources don’t support the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all.
No matter what plausible sounding reason you give yourself and others, you are only lying.
Sometimes, it’s not you who is lying.
When she was interviewing, the folks at the VC firm told her that they intended to invest twenty percent of their resources in developing-country growth initiatives. That was exactly what Hemlata Laghari had hoped to hear.
Hemlata grew up in a middle-class family in India and after working for several years with a humanitarian organisation, like a lot successful Indians, she moved to the US looking for even bigger opportunities to create new growth companies in emerging countries. This job seemed like a perfect fit, and she accepted the offer wholeheartedly.
But it turned out, in spite of their promises, the firm didn’t have the resolve or the resources to deliver. With each new assignment, Hemlata would hope for a developing-country investment, but one never materialised. She took the job believing it’s in the best position to create a dent in emerging markets, but her assignments continually focused on the United States.
In the end she became embittered toward her employer, feeling that the firm and its leaders had deceptively misspent her time and talents in the prime of her life. She eventually left.
Could she have better assessed this job? Yes! By asking one simple question: what has to prove true? What has to prove true if a VC firm is really interested in investing in developing-country growth initiatives?
A good place to start would be to look at the characteristics of other firms that have successfully entered the developing world.
For example, firms that have a deep commitment to developing countries typically have capital tied to investment there. They have partners dedicated to the practice. Their investors are attracted to the company in part because of its work in the developing world.
If Hemlata had done this assessment, she would likely have recognised that though the firm might have intended to invest in emerging economies, it was quite unlikely that they would really do so. As much as they wanted, it wasn’t part of their actual strategy.
In business — not unlike an individual — what you intend to achieve and how you will get there is the result of multiple influences: what a company’s priorities are, how a company responds to opportunities and threats along the way, and how a company allocates its precious resources. These things all continuously combine, to create and evolve a strategy.
Occasionally, the actual strategy maps quite closely with what the business intends. But often what the business actually ends up doing is very different from what it had set out to do originally.
The art of managing this is identifying the nature of the challenge that is creating this divide, finding an overall approach to deal with it, and defining a set of coordinated actions that support the approach and mitigate the challenge.
When Jobs returned as CEO in 1997, he immediately set to work fixing the underlying resource allocation problem.
Rather than allowing everyone to focus on their own sense of priorities, Jobs brought Apple back to its roots: to make the best products in the world, change the way people think about using technology in their lives, and provide a fantastic user experience.
Anything not aligned with that got scrapped. People who did not agree were fired. Soon, people began to understand that if they didn’t allocate their resources in a way that was consistent with Apple’s priorities, they would land in hot water.
More than anything else, the manner in which Jobs prioritised the company’s resources was why Apple was able to deliver on what it said it would. Actually following through with the intented strategy was a big part of why the company was able to regain its status among the world’s most successful.
Resource allocation speaks louder than words.
Timeless Insight
While most of us spend our idle moments thinking about the things we want but don’t have, we would be much better off to spend this time thinking of all the things we have and reflecting on how much we would miss them if they were not ours.
Doing this can dramatically enhance the enjoyment of our life.
Imagine two sons.
The first one periodically reflects upon his parents’ mortality, while the second one isn’t comfortable entertaining such gloomy thoughts. He subconsciously assumes that there’s plenty of time for him to enjoy his time with them.
The first son appreciates the fact that their time together is limited, and is therefore likely to be more attentive and loving than the second. He would try to take full advantage of opportunities to interact with them throughout the day.
The second son, in contrast, would be unlikely to experience a rush of delight on encountering his parents. He would fail to take advantage of opportunities to interact with them in the belief that such interactions can be postponed until later. And when he finally does get around to interacting with them, the delight he derives from their company will most likely not be as profound as the delight the first son would experience from such interactions.
This same experiment can be extended to friendships, relationships, and even our very own self. Friendships can end, our loved ones might leave us, and we might die tomorrow.
What I’m Reading
Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders — presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.
— Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die
Tiny Thought
Losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing only half of it.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋