Abilities and Skills of Corporate “Strategic people”

A strategy is the organization's competitive "logic" manifested through organizational actions.

 The business strategic logic is acquired through a learning process involving discourse within the context of an organization's culture. You can call a plan or a course of action to have pre-defined results only when “strategic people” are involved. 

“Strategic people” are those who have decision-making authority or who can veto a decision. They should have vision, knowledge, or common sense to bring all stakeholders together with the right view and conduct. Here is a set of abilities and skills of corporate strategy practitioners.

An understanding of the past and an understanding of the future so far as data permits: History often repeats itself, a good strategic practitioner understands the interconnection from the temporal dimension, see how things in the new come from the past. The past allows you to recognize possible conflicts that could approach from where you have been to where you want to go. In fact, the hindsight from the rear mirror is a useful tool to make sure you understand where you are, any immediate gaps or dangers that make the forward view unrealistic, and how to develop a good strategy through re-introducing the past in a new way and build the bridge to connect the past to today’s business initiatives and performance smoothly,

The issue is that the rear mirror only cannot steer the business vehicle moving forward. It’s critical to harness the power of information for providing the emergent business trends with a fact-based vision of where to aim and how to get there. A strategy practitioner understands how changes would happen over time toward the future, connects the previously unconnected dots, looks into the unknown future,  attempts to define the landscape with its opportunities and risks, and help to push the future in the direction they want, strongly and reliably.

Ability to view the complete business system as a dynamic ecosystem with all its dependencies and interconnections: Contemporary organizations are not just the sum of functional pieces, but an integral whole. When using the word “strategy,” it must have a long term objective, the company level implications, and deals with the business ecosystem interactively. A strategy practitioner can take a holistic look at the variety of business relationships and interconnectivity, connect the wide dots, make strategic choices, and take a series of actions to reach the well-set vision in a step-wise manner.

The digital lens has many dimensions, such as socio-cultural, socio-technical, socio-economic, organizational, scientific, philosophical or anthropological, etc. Strategic people are open-minded, learning agile, advocate out-of-box thinking, breakdown silos, and focus on relationships between things rather than characteristics of things. Because limited hierarchy works best in a creative environment in which the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of strategy management to lead long term business success.

The ability to tie all important things together in order to develop actionable plans: The strategy is the art of designing a way of navigating and effectively utilizing available resources to attain a clearly defined objective. However, in many business contexts, the word strategy is either an oxymoron or demotivating. Many strategies are not executable, as many organizations have an intention, but not an execution ethos; have human resources, but lack of the right talent being put in the right positions to solve the right problems. It is critical to identify and strengthen the weakest link - people and determine how each part of the organization, including all of the key elements must "put it all together" to be successful in implementing strategy and bring tangible business results seamlessly.

Strategy navigation is critical to improving its success rate. Many organizations don't have a clear organizational identity (vision & mission, values, culture, and brand). If the top management doesn't know "who" the organization is, the planning and its execution will likely be inefficient. Strategic plans need to get to the level of specifically achievable goals such as "Who is doing what, with whom, how are they doing it and when does it need to be started and finished by," and achieve measurable results effortlessly.

The ability to identify key leverage points in which the nonproportional impact can be made: The difference between the tactical manager and strategic leader is that the first one thinks about the business from a transactional perspective while the second one is thinking business from a transformational perspective; the first one focuses on “ keeping the lights on,” while the second one focuses on exploring the “art of possible.” Strategic people are often skillful business solutionists, who can assign their talent, resources, and time carefully to solve problems that really matter, and make non -proportional impact to build business advantage innovatively.

To survive and thrive in today’s “VUCA” digital new normal, companies need to understand that prioritization technique is a critical leverage point that enables them to spend time and energy on strategic goals and result-driven activities. Strategic people can “see” the business context, identify the leverage points of the business system and then 'choose' the 'decisive' factors, have a respected intra-organizational agreement of priorities and resources, laser focus on strategic imperatives, and unlock business performance relentlessly.

The ability to hypothesize interventions and iterate them till the right fit is made: Due to the rapid changes, the "right" strategy can't be completely defined by the planning space. If a strategy can be thought of as a bunch of hypotheses about how the business executes to achieve the desired outcome, then, execution is the testing of those hypotheses in the real world as it attempts to implement the strategies. A digital strategy execution is not linear steps but an iterative continuum. Too many organizations separate thinking and doing. One of the challenges in executing the strategy well stems from a lack of understanding or ownership of the strategic principles. Handing off a strategy without suggested execution is risky even to a senior person.

A strategy is a planned direction to act and provides the first steps but can be radically changed as demanded by the environment and experience of execution. It can be thought of as a bunch of hypotheses about how one might execute to achieve the desired outcome, then, execution is the testing of those hypotheses in the real world as one attempts to implement or execute the strategies. The learning from the testing of those hypotheses allows one to tweak, or even pivot on the strategy in order to better meet the real-world execution.

Strategic thinking encourages thinking about the future by exploring the “why” factor and dealing with "discovering novel'', rewriting the rules of the competitive game. "Strategy" should be in the DNA of anyone who is a member of the leadership team of an organization, but, as we know, that doesn't make it so, unfortunately, less than 5% of the population is a natural strategic thinker. Still, strategic thinking can be developed and strategic people are in demand to solve complex problems and overcome business challenges.

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