Evan Campbell: Your Strategy Is Decaying... Here's How to Save It

Your strategy is your theory of how you're going to persuade or influence your customers in your market to move in a direction that helps you win. And then there needs to be accountability for strategy execution, which is tracking week by week, quarter by quarter, whether these well-intended, hardworking employees are paddling in the right direction or are furiously enthusiastically paddling straight into the rocks because strategy decay confused the signal, right? On this episode, I'm speaking to Evan Campbell. Evan's a tech executive, entrepreneur, consultant, and former US Army Airborne Ranger and Green Beret who says he always wanted to be a cowboy and now spends much of his time farming and ranching in Colorado. Apparently because he enjoys work where you can actually see tangible results for the effort you put in, which must make a pleasant change from consulting. Evan used to be a bass player in a covers band, but he's more recently turned his hand to trying to get organizations into a strategic rhythm, making sure executive leaders are getting into the groove and hopefully not slapping anyone around with his new book, Adapt to Win, which promises us a framework to overcome strategy decay, presumably before everything goes completely out of tune. Evan, thanks for coming. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Jason. That is far and away the best introduction I've had for a podcast. Well done, sir. That's what they all say. And as I always say, kind of just copying myself now, it's just downhill from here. But it's always good to start, you know, it's good to start on a high. Right. So first things first, we obviously covered a bit of your bio in the intro. But obviously, not all of my listeners or viewers are going to have heard of you or know who you are. Not yet anyway, but they're about to. So give me a bit of your story and kind of where you come from and what you're up to these days. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I've been both a technology leader, CTO, VP of product development. I've had some P&L responsibility for some product lines through the years. But I've gone back and forth between, you know, being a leader in the organization and being a management consultant, helping other organizations, a wide variety of different settings. You know, early in the career, it was lean and agile development methodologies, both software and hardware. And then more recently, I was CTO of a consulting company, one of the larger agile transformation consultancies that we sold to Accenture, spent three years of managing director there, got my check and moved out here to the ranch. But I, I've really been interested the last few years in particular, I've kind of moved up the organizational stack, if you will, seeking the root cause of the problems that cause organizations to fail in the market to be less dynamic, less competitive, less adaptive. And I've really had a passion of late for strategic adaptability. And it is the pinnacle, right? And so I, you know, I often tell people, I do strategy consulting, and they're like, Oh, you compete with McKinsey and BCG. And, you know, I really don't. That's if they don't kick you out of the house by that point as well. Yeah, right. If they haven't just turned their back and left, you know, it's really in, in strategy, their strategy development, their strategy deployment, and their strategy execution, which we can talk more about all those, they really do the development. And then, you know, they cashed their multimillion dollar check and they're gone. They don't want to stick around for the dirty. Yeah, thank you. You know, I don't want to compete with that. You know, they've done 20 pharma businesses that are almost the same. So they have this wealth of intellectual property of environmental and industry and competitive analysis, you know, and if they remember to do the find and replace in the PowerPoint decks, you know, your company name in, you know, they've just got an enormous wealth of assets that they bring. But they're not interested in the dirty work of creating the organization capability to actually realize the strategic objective. So that's been my focus, strategy deployment, and then tracking strategy execution to see if it's on track and adjust course. And that's the top level value prop of my book. Wow, you've kind of anticipated the next question already. Because of course, that is one of the things that you've been up to recently, or relatively recently, I think the book came out in May, adapt to win, which is which I've read already. And, you know, really enjoyed it. I don't have a copy physically so far. So I couldn't put it on the shelf just to show my adoring viewers. But at the same time, you know, it was great to kind of go through and see what was inside and dig out some of the themes. And you've kind of summed up the core value proposition as to kind of kind of paraphrase like, how to get this stuff to actually work versus strategy being kind of a ephemeral kind of up in the clouds, you know, Oh, yeah, let's everyone go off into a room. And then we'll do some stuff or as you say, present a PowerPoint, and then off they go again. And then it just kind of goes nowhere. And I've certainly now remembering some clients I've worked with where it's felt like they would be strategizing or getting different consultants in to do new strategies every two or three months and never actually making any steps to actually achieve any of the strategies. Do you find that happens a lot? Yeah. And the super tankers still, you know, bludgeoning along, keeps going. That's the that's the force of inertia. You know, in bigger organizations, more traditional bureaucratic organizations, the inertia of what people are doing is immense. And, you know, you can change your strategy, but if you don't, you've got two really malignant forces working against you as an executive. When you're trying to achieve a new set, especially an innovative or disruptive set of strategic objectives, you've got this force of inertia, which is just like the behemoth plods along. And it takes a lot of force to to alter that course. The other one that I talk about, and it's in the subtitle of the book, you know, the subtitle is a framework to overcome strategy decay using OKRs and lean portfolio management. And so we can zoom in on any of those elements. But strategy decay is is it's it's another sort of force of physics similar to inertia. But it's the entropy. It's the inclination of an order complex system to fall into disorder and decay. And you have to put energy into the system to maintain order and consistency and clarity of your message. So strategy decay is essentially a problem with your signal to noise ratio in the organization. Your leadership intent is the signal that you want to communicate for where employees and investment should focus. The noise comes from the marketplace, the pipeline, the support, the you know, all of all of the chaos. Anyway, so that's that's what we're trying to to achieve in the organization is clarity of strategic intent and the force to actually get us get us moving there. But it's interesting that you mentioned entropy, because one of my kind of things I like to read about on the side is, you know, astrophysics and Neil deGrasse Tyson and all that stuff. And obviously the I mean, I love all of it. And kind of harks back to me trying to study physics when I was younger. But just this idea, though, that entropy is obviously the disorder of a system. And it's also inevitable. And the only way to kind of stop it from just becoming more disordered is, as you put it, put energy in. But it's also still inevitable, right? Ultimately, heat death of the universe, entropy is going to kind of reach its ultimate state. And then everything's going to be gone. But this inevitability kind of almost makes strategy sound like it's always tending towards decay. Is that a fair statement? Yes, it is. I mean, I don't want to call it a constant battle, because honestly, you know, leaders and organizations should embrace the challenge and the responsibility and accountability to ensure that the organization is achieving, you know, the outcomes and impacts that we want. I wish more organizations would attempt to measure and evaluate the sources of entropy that contribute to strategy decay. I mean, if you have a very deep hierarchy and organizational silos around functions, as so many large traditional American bureaucracies have, you're a strategy, you know, you've got a much more difficult signal to noise ratio problem that requires a much bigger investment in effectively deploying your strategy and achieving that clarity of strategic intent constantly, as opposed to a more modern organization that's flatter and potentially more organized around the value streams that are effectively collaborating to achieve outcomes for the organization in that environment, the force of entropy is less and the amount of energy to overcome strategy decay is it requires less. But, you know, you got to test for these things, Jason, right? How many organizations are really doing pulse surveys or employee engagement surveys, asking the question, you know, where do we play? How do we win? You know, what are the key goals that you're focused on this quarter? And, you know, a pulse survey of two or three questions quarterly will provide a lot of information about how effective the executives are being in deploying their strategic intent throughout the organization. It's interesting, though, because obviously, kind of a bit of a cliche joke, I guess, but that assumes that there is a strategic intent in the first place, right? Because, you know, I'm sure you have walked into a bunch of clients, I've definitely walked into a bunch of clients where you walk in, and it kind of feels like there's not really any strategic choice been made at all. It's maybe just tends towards that entropy that you're talking about, like everything looks like a good option. And maybe they could do a bit of this and a bit of that. Or you speak to like, one person in one department, you talked about silos, they have one opinion about what the priorities should be and what even the strategy is, other teams have something different on their mind. And maybe the leadership team, even they themselves aren't kind of even aligned, but you ask the CTO and the CEO and the COO, and they all have different opinions about it as well. So again, it does kind of speak to that disorder. But like, is that like the most common thing? Yeah, I was gonna say, Yeah, you're pointing to a real problem. And, you know, as I said, I usually am working with organizations where the CEO and the chief strategy officer telling me in the beginning, we've got this great strategy. You know, we paid McBain CG, you know, $4 million, two years ago. But, you know, the, the board thinks we're executing on it, but we're really not showing much progress. And we need, we need your help. But we're totally aligned on the strategy. The executive suite totally gets it. You know, we did an employee engagement survey and less than 10% of the employees know what the hell we're talking about. But we're totally in lockstep and alignment. I get in there, and I'm looking at their, you know, okay, great, you're, you know, your vision and your mission are very nice and fuzzy and fluffy. And the problem, though, is like, you really, I like Roger Martin's language, and I use it in kind of the house of strategy that I construct with clients. Like, sometimes I come in, and they really do have their act together and understand what they're trying to achieve and have made some trade off decisions that are tough. It's really common, though, like you said, I go in there, and they have this very superficial alignment and consensus among the executives. But they haven't made, they haven't got down the specificity of where do we play? And how do we win? And what does that mean? What, you know, what are, what's the long list of things that we're not doing, of markets that we're not competing in, of initiatives that we're not funding? And I scratched the surface of this superficial consensus, and it blows up the room. Just like you said, you know, everybody's used this ambiguity to tell themselves, I don't have to give up any of my pet projects, none of my sacred cows are going to get gored. So you have to go through that to get to the point that you actually have strategic objectives that are deployable. Now, I tend to use objectives and key results as the framework to do that. Honestly, there, I've used half a dozen different goals and measures, frameworks for strategy, Potion Connery, MBOs, V2Mom, 4DX, you know, all of them have goals and measures. There's some, you can, and you can have an effective strategy realization program using any of them. You can also fail with OKRs or any of them if you embrace a few of the anti-patterns and failures that have caused old programs like MBOs to fail so miserably in organizations through the years. Well, you can't say something like that and then not list at least a handful of the kind of the common failure modes that, you know, people might expect to come across in those sorts of cases. Well, if I must. Okay, page one. So, probably the first most commonly encountered addy pattern that destroys your strategy deployment and execution program is tying the goals and measures programs to rewards. If this becomes an HR program that is, the employees suspect is driving goals and rewards, they will instantly, and this is what ruined MBOs, like we all learned in big bureaucratic corporate America decades ago, how to sandbag the objectives and game the numbers so we always got our bonus. If you do that with your OKR program, if the employees think that this is driving rewards, you will never see another ambitious objective set again forever, right? So, you have to have utter clarity and focus that this is a strategy program and don't turn it into performance management. So, that's a really common way to break your OKR program and about 70% of organizations implementing OKRs fail, which is not coincidentally the same 70% number of corporate strategic initiatives that fail broadly. So, another thing about OKRs, and this is, you know, I often say OKRs, the killer feature of OKRs is for large, particularly the large bureaucratic organizations that we're referencing, is horizontal alignment. MBOs, one of the problems with the way MBOs were usually implemented was it was very much a cascade of these derivative goals that were handed down to people who sort of just received them like so much manure falling from on high. And you don't take accountability, half the time they didn't make a lot of sense because they were so derivative, they were sort of this like this inherent, this forced inheritance relationship that distorted them. So, OKRs work as well as they do because of this essential philosophical difference where we're engaging the teams, the departments, the product lines in a conversation where they're proposing their own objectives that ladder up to the higher level corporate BU product line objectives above them. And by having them think deeply about how their role in the organization and their abilities are going to advance the objectives of the corporation to help us win, we achieve greater focus, greater understanding, and a much higher level of accountability and ownership of those objectives because the people have been involved in creating them themselves. We also ask them, what dependencies, what do you need from other departments and functions? Look, I'm, you know, we're asking you for a sales growth number. Well, they need some help from marketing. So, you know, let's play a game of catchball or identify exactly where we need to get marketing to own an OKR that delivers what sales needs to own theirs. And the employees know these things better, again, than the top-down method that we typically witnessed in the battle days. So call it what you will, goals and measures, but embrace the philosophical aspects of strategy deployment and execution processes that make them successful. Yeah, it's interesting, because, again, I guess one of the cliches of OKRs is, you know, everyone's saying that they're doing them these days, it's obviously become very de rigueur in the general corporate world. And I think you described yourself in the book as the kind of the steel thread that connects it all, but doesn't feel like it's always a steel thread. It kind of feels like in many cases, you have leadership teams, or even maybe bottom up OKR kind of installation, which basically just almost wallpaper over the existing, like you talked about earlier, the kind of the inertia, or the gravity that's kind of holding them back. And they just end up just calling what they were already measuring or trying to do OKRs, because that's what the cool tech companies do. But actually, they're not really seeing any of the benefits because they've not actually changed anything about how they do anything. They've just called it a different thing. Yeah. Or FOKRs, as we like to call them. I love that. You're spot on. And, you know, one of the things we see, if the executives aren't forced to define in with great clarity and focus, where we play and how we win and express that in OKRs that are specific enough to enable that steel thread to deploy down the organization, we end up oftentimes with people, your audience, product managers, are in a really difficult, important position. So we're portfolio man, enterprise portfolio managers who are running the process where they're allocating scarce capital and delivery capacity to infinite demand for initiatives and projects. These are both key roles, making trade-off decisions, trying to understand, trying to assign value and prioritize candidates, um, based on their strategic impact, their, the strategic alignment with the goals of the organization. If those goals aren't clear, they're in a really vulnerable position where what I see with portfolio managers is it's like, I got screamed at by a bunch of general managers and executive vice presidents, because I pick this one's baby initiative instead of this one, I almost got fired and I'm never going to do this again. So from now on, because I can't prove which initiatives more strategically valuable, I'm just going to be a monkey with a calculator and I'm going to run IRR and NPV based on the numbers they give me. And that's my prioritization. Now, the problem with that is, as you know, Jason is an innovation initiative, a disruption initiative to seize, uh, a new market share or something has no measurable ROI. Um, so what you end up doing is funding a bunch of cost takeout initiatives and really tactical things. And after a couple of years of not funding anything innovative or disruptive, you lose competitiveness as an organization. And so that's, that's so much what I was really trying to get to with the whole portfolio management part of the book. Um, this is 10 plus years of, um, development and research and implementation with real clients of some really innovative portfolio management techniques that are really designed to ensure that we have an objective empirical approach to assigning strategic value. So we don't end up just measuring everything in ROI. But how do you do that then? Let's kind of boil that down to brass tacks because like on the one hand, and you kind of mentioned things like net present value, and there's also like a bunch of different kind of product prioritization frameworks. I think some of them you talk about in the book, you know, rice and where it short is job first and cost of delay, all these different ways to almost try and force the appearance of numeric kind of dependability onto what is ultimately a fairly subjective decision. But people are trying to do this a lot. And obviously on the financial side, they are because of course, you know, money talks, but also from a kind of a generic kind of concept of value or strategic value. People are just, you know, they're putting on reach numbers and impact numbers, and they're, they're trying to come up with some kind of certainty out the back of it. So obviously, that level of certainty doesn't actually exist. And if it was easy, then everyone would just like make the best decisions all the time. So how do you kind of come up with this idea of like, well, going beyond ROI and actually trying to come up with the future strategic value of an initiative that like you say, is not going to pay off for a bit. But if you just keep kind of sucking from the pipe of like, like now, you're kind of like, let's make some money now. And then eventually you end up kind of running out of whatever you run out of the pipe, you know, running out of smoke. Like, how do you measure that? Right. Um, well, I mean, it's, it's a big topic. And, um, as you say, I, I, I do have a chapter in the book because, you know, not because it, it isn't well known, you know, every portfolio management book in the world explains the difference between IRR and PV payback. You know, this, that's nothing original there. You know, I, I push it further up into, um, some more advanced techniques like real options and, um, you know, opinion markets and things, but, um, you know, I felt like it's, you know, I am trying to, um, have a comprehensive portfolio management framework, so I included the financial valuation piece in case people weren't that familiar with that, but the original part and, and, you know, and it is completely original and it's, it goes far beyond what scaled agile framework, lean portfolio management or, uh, PMI or any of the other, you know, people out there, um, is on this area of assigning value based on strategic impact. How do we do that? Um, I mean, it's, it's an enormously, it's a big area. And, and I start with six rules of portfolio management that basically if you don't want to suck, embrace and follow these six rules, right? If you don't follow these basic rules, and these are things like decoupling. Delivery and funding supply from demand so that you can reallocate it dynamically with less friction and with less, um, less loss or waste as, as you, uh, reallocate, uh, investment, um, you know, each portfolio has one intake system. It's forced rank, no two items. Um, and then I have six principles, which are things that you should understand and seek to find a means by which you generally comply with, um, some of the things that, that we're doing Jason to try to, um, use the, every portfolio can have its own value assignment technique. We also break the, the candidate initiatives or assigned candidate initiatives, investment sectors, we call them. So if you have a cost takeout initiative, um, we are not trying to compare that to an innovation initiative. If we've made a higher level portfolio allocation decision, um, you know, their portfolios within portfolios, it all rolls up finally to one giant enterprise corporate portfolio. Um, if we say at the corporate level, product line or business unit or geography, A, B, and C are going to get these percentages of available investment and capacity, we can then say within a given portfolio, our allocation target is we're going to hold to 10% investment in innovative initiatives, right? So we're not going to starve the innovation sector. Doesn't mean we can't change it at any time. It doesn't mean we can't make a decision for a quarter or two to change our mind, but let's put a line in the sand. And so at that point, we've got a set of candidates that are all innovation related or growth related or cost takeout or brand or whatever. And within those sectors, we can make a prioritization decisions within those sectors. We can invest less portfolio analysis overhead in the ones that are obviously going to fall out. And then we can start to recombine them back into, um, one portfolio backlog, if you will, um, we need the steel thread for the strict, like if we've got in a candidate that's in the cost takeout area, we're going to completely leverage. NPV IRR type math monkey math, um, for prioritizing everything in that sector. If we're in the innovation sector, we're completely looking at our ambitious strategic objectives to compete and win, um, to drive the value assignment and priority, there is no ROI, so let's, let's not pull out the calculator. Right. Um, for every portfolio, we have a portfolio vision. That's a fairly persistent long live definition of what is good look like for this portfolio? What is this portfolio's ambition? What are we trying to achieve? How does this portfolio help us win? And we also have a more volatile and theory driven, uh, value hypothesis for the portfolio. And this is where we have the opportunity to, um, use lean startup type thinking to express a value hypothesis, run experiments against it and pivot when we find that, um, the value hypothesis needs to be tuned. Um, all, all of this ties to the steel thread up to the strategic objectives above us. Kind of reminds me of that explore, exploit continuum, I think from one of the strategizer books where you've kind of got the messy wiggly all over the place at the beginning. And that requires a very different set of approaches to the kind of, you know, turn the handle, milk the cash cow type thing, and then you get into the other things around like, well, what about when we kind of have, you know, like we start early, we, we come to our majority or maturity and then after that eventually decline and you better hope that you've got your next S curve starting to come up behind it. Otherwise you end up getting block busted and such. So that portfolio thing is an interesting approach that it feels like a lot of people, maybe in the product world, they, they kind of think, or they seem to think the world portfolio is a little bit kind of, ew, you know, it kind of starts to sound a bit kind of like you've got a PMO office or something like that, or, you know, it's a bit project managing, but you also talked just now about the, almost the importance of removing project based funding or not funding projects, but funding value streams, you know, you talked about that a couple of times, you talk about it in the book and it's something that not a lot of companies or, or rather a lot of companies still seem to be addicted to the, what they, I guess, consider almost like the predictability of a project based model. They'll, you know, they'll fund a thing as a start and a finish, put it on the books, they can release it out and then they move on to the next thing. So from your perspective, why is it so important to get away from that kind of start and end fixed scope thing and move on to something a bit more kind of nimble? Well, I'm a huge advocate of, of the movement from project to product, especially in, you know, in product development. I mean, it's absolutely existential in product development. There are things that are projects. I mean, you know, you know, pave a road, you know, upgrade the processors in data center XYZ. Those are projects. But in the enterprise portfolio management space, we're funding a lot of initiatives that don't necessarily have this really clear beginning, middle and end that a project, I mean, there's projects in there, but there are initiatives and product management is full of initiatives. When you have a strategic product roadmap, it's ideally populated with themes. The top level roadmap is thematic and it's saying, what are, what are we trying to accomplish in the marketplace or for, you know, personas or, a segment, you know, over this period of time and sequencing those and experimenting and iterating, well, initiatives, a lot of initiatives, can work the same way. And one of the things we see, and this is a pathology that has followed around project thinking for a long time is that once we fund it, we're kind of stuck with this decision until it's over and done. And, you know, an item 3,742 in the spec sheet has been delivered. Well, anybody that's worked in an agile environment knows that, you know, when you prioritize for value and early value realization, you really have this decay of the value in your backlog. That's, that's pretty precipitous. Um, there's a really strong Pareto effect here where, you know, maybe 80% of the value is delivered by 20% of the work. And we, we really push in our portfolio approach and, you know, for almost any kind of initiative in the enterprise, trim the tail, people, when somebody old organizations that have typical PMO behaviors, sponsors see a high ROI project. And they think it's a Christmas tree. They hang every ornament, every piece of crap, every dream they ever had on it. Cause this is finally going to get through the pre PMO process and get funded. So it bloats and it bloats and it's carrying its way along. It's kind of like a bill in Congress. I was going to say like a pork belly bill, right? You know, exactly, exactly. So you just know, there's a ton of crap attached to this thing. Um, look, we got to think like VCs, you know, funding is contingent. Uh, we, we fund in tranches based on proven results that are indicating that the benefit realization is occurring the way it should. And, um, we trim the tail so that when we're down with, when the incremental value of one more quarter of investment in this initiative is yielding less than the potential return from a new candidate for investment or, or whatever we, we, we trim the tail, we cut that, we, we put it down. Um, and a healthy organization should expect an embrace that that is the way to maximize portfolio returns throughout the corporation and aggregate. But one of the central ideas in the book is, and we kind of touched on it a little bit already, this concept of strategy decay, um, you know, we kind of talked about the entropy and how you can have a strategy and it all starts to fall apart. Uh, certainly if you don't kind of actively manage it, but if we accept that that does happen, what are some of the early warning signs that you would kind of look for in an organization? Yeah. Maybe we covered some of them already, but like kind of a checklist, I guess, or like the early signals that maybe, you know, you were lucky enough to have done the strategy work now it's starting to fall apart and kind of fray around the edges, like, how can you tell sooner rather than later that that started to happen? Yeah. I mean, I I've gotten to where I, I see it so much, I can smell it before I walk in the door, um, what does it smell like? Come on. It's not a good smell. Um, the, uh, you know, I often have this conversation with a CEO, you know, early in the engagement, Oh man, you know, we got this beautiful strategy. I, we printed it on the coffee cups. We, we gave everybody a little card to put on their lanyard along with their ID. I did, you know, a town hall and I, I send out an email quarterly and, you know, we did a survey and the employees don't know what the hell we're supposed to be working on around here. Um, hell well, you know, who's job, who's accountable to see to it that this beautiful strategy is being executed. Oh, I don't know, man. That sounds like something the managerial minions should be doing. It's the business's job to do it. Remember that's always the great get out is the business. I mean, I've talked with chief strategy officers who are highly compensated people with very prestigious roles who have literally looked me in the eye and say, Oh man, I don't get involved in that dirty stuff of like trying to actually, you know, see if it's becoming real. I'm up here on my ivory tower thinking big thoughts about the future, man. That's what they pay me for. And yeah, that's the smell, dude. That's that's, you know, so there, there needs to be accountability. For experts who are facilitating strategy deployment so that people are creating good OKRs, really understanding their contribution, and then there needs to be accountability for strategy execution, which is tracking week by week, quarter by quarter, whether these well-intended hardworking employees are paddling in the right direction or are furiously enthusiastically paddling straight into the rocks because strategy decay confused the signal. Right. So, I mean, you, you can't realize your strategy if you don't know whether you're making progress towards it or not. Um, especially at the portfolio, you know, this is why I focus on the portfolio level too, you know, you can talk all day about what your strategy is. Don't show me your PowerPoints, show me what you're spending money on building. And that tells me what your, what strategy is actually being realized intentionally or otherwise. What's that kind of idea of like a de facto strategy? Like even if you don't really have one, or even if you say you've got one, it's kind of what's going on on the street. That's what really matters, right? That's that inertia. I mean, it's, it's going somewhere. I mean, one of the things you run into is everybody's going everywhere. Um, you know, the, these siloed organizations are horrendous for this because without strong leadership and clarity of strategic intent to force horizontal alignment among the senior executives, either, either innocently because there isn't clarity, so they just make it up themselves or more maliciously, um, because they just don't care and they'd rather locally optimize for what serves their interests. Either way, they control goals and rewards for their silo. And if they're not forced to have a common set of objectives that they're all striving towards together, they will be working at cross purposes. You know, in the book, I tell a story about a wonderful, I was working for a large, uh, manufacturing conglomerate. Um, one of the divisions, uh, was a wonderful company in, in, um, the oil, gas and mineral exploration space. They made, uh, the, just these brilliant, um, sensors and emitters that went on drill strings. When you run a drill down into the earth, um, for exploration purposes, they, they would, uh, take all the data from these. They had this wonderful software that was a visualization of all of the different, um, minerals and materials and densities and stuff throughout the earth. And you could almost like fly through the earth and see, oh, there's a hunk of gold and there's a bunch of oil and here's some water. And it was the coolest thing I ever saw. These guys were beloved by their customers because they are, their engineers could turn on a dime. They were always innovating, brilliant solutions. They got acquired by this, this huge parent company who, who forced upon them a bunch of procurement standards and things, global procurement for this company somehow was this all powerful fascist organization that, and I won't get into all the details, but I mean, they basically forced them into a mode of working that made innovation, experimentation, and prototyping impossible. The engineers became so demoralized that they stopped trying to innovate and they lost their competitive edge and evolved, ultimately were divested at a loss by the parent company who had paid a premium for them, ruined them, and never figured out why it was that the investment wasn't working out. So this is also an issue in the book. I introduced this idea of organizational coherence. You, these are, these are components of the operating model. You know, you're, you're sourcing your geographies, your organizational design, your compensation strategies, insourcing, outsourcing, all of these decisions are up model decisions. How many times have you and I seen, you know, let me count the ways organizations where every silo gets to make up its own decisions about what to optimize for that procurement organization that I'm talking about was not optimized to deliver the strategic objectives of the parent company. They actually. objectives of the parent company, they actually were actively undermining them day by day. So get clarity of where you play and how you win, optimize your business models, thinking like Alex Osterwalder's business model canvas, optimize the business model to deliver the strategic objectives and then optimize, there you have it, beautiful book. There's an operating model canvas book that is very much in that model that I've used pretty extensively. So yeah, this organization, don't be an incoherent organization. You know, you can't inform decisions about business models and operating models if you don't have strategic clarity, because all of it is in the service of achieving the strategic objectives. I think that thing about silos though is really important because obviously kind of silos tend to sort of build themselves up and spring up all over the place anyway, because kind of everyone wants to sort of stick with their people and, you know, kind of almost, as you put earlier, kind of optimize for their local situation. But it kind of feels like as the company gets larger, you end up sometimes either you have different silos arguing against each other because they all think something different is important and there's no one there to kind of tie them together, but I've also seen people in those organizations, sometimes if they kind of straddle silos themselves, have to almost argue against themselves because there's no coherence above them and they are responsible for two of the silos, both of which want different things and they can't really break the tie. And obviously, you know, we're going to sit there and say that strategy is how they break the tie, right? But for the most part, it kind of feels like that remains a struggle, that it's really hard to stay coherent, which again, I guess is just this whole strategic decay that you've been talking about, right? This idea that, that everything just starts to fall apart when it kind of, almost when it, when it meets reality. And I've seen really well, I mean, I usually assume good intent on everybody's part. Oh yeah. Everyone's trying to do the right thing, but just within one context, right? Yeah. I mean, you know, this is something you'll recognize in your audience very much. So one of the places where I see well-intentioned people try to reduce friction very often is between product and engineering and, you know, product management, product development, what have you. And I have seen many times them invent their own OKR program. They, they will decide to create an OKR ghetto, a lovely little walled garden of OKRs living in the middle of the organization all by itself. And, you know, I used to talk about agile ghettos. It's sort of the same thing. I guess, you know, it's, it's, it's better to have a lovely little walled garden where you're trying to do the right thing, but it's also perilous. They're doing this because of the absence of effective strategy deployment above them, right? That steel thread is nowhere to be found for them to grab onto and ladder up to, right, but they know they need more effective alignment in this relationship. So they create their own OKRs. There really isn't anybody there to validate that the OK, that the objectives are aligned to the organization. Is that dangerous? Yes. Um, you know, the portfolio managers turned into monkeys with calculators. The product managers invented their own objectives, absent clarity of the organizational goals, we've all got coping strategies. Um, the best answer is that the executives kind of get engaged and ensure that strategic intent is clear throughout the organization. That strategic intent point now is very interesting because obviously you're an ex-military man. Well, I don't know if you say you're an ex-military man or if you're always a military man at heart, but this kind of idea of like a commander's intent. You can tell it's ex. I only dream of being able to grow such a mustache, but it's interesting because so much of strategic vocabulary and kind of the concepts of strategy, they kind of go all the way back to the art of war back in the first place, right. But it kind of, there's so much military language around sort of setting strategy up and then there's this kind of cut in the military that I'm aware of from former podcast guests, I've never been in the military myself, of kind of commander's intent and this idea that it's the kind of the top brass's job to set the direction and then it's the kind of the people that are there in the battle that actually have to go and work out how to do it and it kind of feels like there's still a lot of, in corporate world at least, kind of top-down kind of just do this and that's the only way that they can get coherence is because they don't lead with intent, they just lead with demands and top-down management. Is there a way that you've seen to try and move from one to the other without kind of breaking the organization? Yeah, oh God, where to begin? Yeah, I mean, I recently was doing some lean work with a client who's very much into Six Sigma and lean and they use Hoshin and Connery, you know, and Hoshin and Connery is described as a strategy deployment framework. There are other ways it's described, but, and these guys, they just use it as a tactic, a methodology for deploying. It goes straight from the high level ambition, which is very fuzzy and unarticulated, straight down 17 floors to micromanaging what project is going to be delivered on Wednesday. There's nothing in the middle to provide anybody clarity about why, why any of it? What outcome are we trying to achieve as an organization? It, it drove me crazy. This client drove me crazy cause I couldn't, couldn't make much progress with the leaders because they were so anchored to a command and control culture. But, you know, you, you, you bring up Sun Tzu, the art of war, you know, one of the very beginning of the book, I sort of tell this joke it's on, you know, the website and everything, you know, Sun Tzu should have said, I mean, what's more arrogant than putting words in Sun Tzu's mouth, but, you know, Sun Tzu should have said, you know, um, uh, victory comes not from defining a great strategy, victory comes from executing strategy with great effectiveness. And, you know, you cannot have a highly effective, adaptive learning organization that can sense and respond and make good decisions rapidly if you micromanage tasks. And I really try with clients to be very judicious about using military metaphors. Um, it, it, as you say, you know, there's so much learned, um, through Clausewitz and on and Sun Tzu and onwards about strategy through military and military metaphors, but a lot of people don't appreciate them, uh, for a variety of reasons. So I, I'm very judicious about it. But, um, you know, one, one example I use that I do use is don't, don't be Saddam Hussein's army, right. Um, or the Russian army in Ukraine, for that matter, you know, when you have layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy and the culture doesn't have the safety for people to take decisions to themselves or the skills. And they have to run a question layer after layer, and then the decision comes back down layer after layer. As soon as you interrupt that vertical communication chain, the entire organism is, is, is palsied. It's, it's stalled. It's stuck. Um, you decapitate the generals and the privates can't move, right. The, the U S the thing that makes the U S military exceptional. And I, and I, I've worked with first para and other, um, British military elements, and they're just as good this way, you know, the, the mission statement wasn't turned right at the rock, turn left at the tree, jump over the Creek, go to the top of hill number four 35, the mission, the mission statement was seeing as high ground that gives you control over sector Z. You know, that the stream is full. There's an enemy element behind the tree. We had to go the other way, you know, but you, the, the unit commander on the ground, the company commander, whatever has to have the skills, the permission. And, uh, to make the decisions in context with what you encounter competitively, um, on the ground without the delay and obfuscation and confusion of running it up and down 17 layers, a chain of command to somebody who ultimately isn't there and has no idea what's happening on the ground. Well, that's an interesting point though, around that kind of disconnection, because of course, what you've referred to so far as kind of strategy decay, like this idea that we kind of set it and then everyone's supposed to align behind it and then it all starts to fall apart. Maybe it goes in different directions because of whatever reason. But, you know, one of those reasons could be that the people, as you put it, that are kind of closer in this case, I guess, to the customer or closer to the user, they're kind of just found out some new things that maybe weren't baked into that strategy in the first place. So they had a strategy, they start, they deployed it, they started to execute and measure it, they found some stuff out. And now it's time to effectively change either the tactics, obviously that's one way to do it, but actually maybe the entire strategy needs to change. So how do you differentiate kind of strategic decay from actually kind of well-evidenced time to change? Yeah. So people, people love to argue, uh, which is adaptive. Yeah, people love to argue about whether it's more valuable to have an excellent strategy or be really good at executing. So, you know, I am, first of all, it's a false dichotomy, but, um, a, an organization with a B-level strategy and A-level execution will crush a competitor with an A-level strategy and B-level execution every time, because no matter how good your strategy is, if you cannot deploy it, you can't measure and assess outcomes and you can't be adaptive, right? First of all, you have to be able to successfully deploy a static strategy first, which is hard enough for a majority of organizations. A much higher level competency is being able to adapt that strategy competitively. Um, which means deploying a different strategy periodically, right? Much harder. So the feedback loop, the reason that the company with A-level execution and a B-level strategy is going to win is because they're getting feedback and data on what's working and what's not, and they're going to adjust and adapt their strategy over time in a way that the organization that can't execute as well. Cannot. So they've got a great strategy, but they're not making it real. And they're not even able really, um, to get the clarity and focus to assess the outcomes that are being delivered. So, um, yeah, I mean, strategy decay is fighting both of them, but a big part of why one of them is executing better is because they acknowledge strategy decay, they measure it and they invest energy to overcome it. Now, I was going to call you out on this B-level, A-level thing, because you know, you mentioned it before this idea that the company with the B-level strategy, A-level execution crushes the competitor every time is what you said. Every time. And I'm sitting there thinking of some of the companies that I'm aware of. Maybe they kind of had a B-level strategy or C or D level strategy, depending on the company. And sometimes, you know, we kind of talked about earlier, you can get into a situation where you're actually pretty good at just executing whatever's in front of you and kind of local optimizations that you say, uh, or maybe even as a system you're executing pretty well, but you're just actually a completely poor, you know, not fit for purpose strategy. So is it really true that a company with a B-level strategy and A-level execution will crush competitor with an A-level strategy and B-level execution. Every time. It's, it's a fair thing to call me out on. Um, and in the book, I kind of explore a little bit. Um, the topic it's a little, it's kind of an indulgent couple of paragraphs, you know, the front. Um, I'll allow it. I'll allow it. Thank you. You're a generous soul. Um, so I, I explore this idea a little bit about, um, depending on what kind of industry or in the, the market, uh, the competitive context, does that answer change? And, uh, I think that what I, what I landed on was if you're an extremely static, um, competitive environment, let's take medical insurance. I mean, what is a less capitalistic, less competitive, less dynamic? I mean, it's so highly this, you know, us not UK, but you know, this is an environment here where these are, these are highly, highly regulated organizations. They have no competitive motivations. They throw off immense amount of free cashflow just for sitting on their butts, doing nothing. Um, versus, you know, a venture funded, you know, innovative company and a really competitive marketplace that's cutthroat. So, you know, in, in, in the really static environment, there really isn't any dynamism to demand strategic adaptability. So the need to execute is relatively less. Um, of course in that environment, you know, the, the strategy that's developed is the same for everybody anyway, I don't know, um, maybe there's an opportunity to have a slight differentiation, um, in the way you define your strategy. And organizations and highly dynamic and competitive markets that are confronting existential risk constantly, it's very Darwinian, right? I mean, the species that wins isn't the biggest, it's the one that adapts the fastest and, you know, so I, I would say the, the more the competitive threat, um, is existential or really, um, you know, driving an order of magnitude, uh, in, in size and success and profitability and growth, the more the execution matters relative to the definition of the strategy, because you're constantly confronting the need to reassess the strategy. Well, it kind of reminds me of a person that we both like to look for. I was going to say mutual friend, but I don't know if either of us know the guy, but the Roger Martin thing, like, uh, if the opposite of your strategy sounds stupid, then, then it's not a strategy. And there's no real kind of, yeah, but there's no right strategy. Like, I think a lot of people out there were looking for a strategy to be almost like a certainty. If we do this, then we're going to win versus just kind of maximizing your chances of winning. And it kind of, then, yeah, that adaptability then really comes into it. Right. Because if there's no right strategy, it's about kind of making your best bet now and then reacting to reality as it comes upon you, right? Yeah. Jason, you nailed it, man. And Roger talks about this. Roger Martin talks about this. I love what he says. You know, if, if doing the opposite of your strategy is just honest face, totally moronic, you haven't defined your strategy with enough. You haven't made a real decision, you know, and, and God, how many times have I, you know, sat there and listened to somebody describing their strategic objectives as motherhood, apple pie, you know, it's like, well, of course you're going to do those things, God, you know, or, or where they think that another common one, it's a slight different issue, but where they think that numbers are a strategy. Oh, we're going to grow 35.7%. It's like, that's a target. That's not the strategy tells you what you're going to do to accomplish that. Not that a target is not a strategy. So, um, you know, the other thing, another thing that Roger put together that I love and I show it to a lot of clients is on YouTube, he has a little video where he says planning is not strategy and it is just marvelous. You know, you, the first six minutes of it is just brilliant. And he's saying, look, um, we love planning. We call it strategic planning, but who's the customer for this? When we're saying you're going to get to build a factory. This is our budget. This is, you know, we're the customer for that. We have, we get so comfortable with planning because we're the customer. We decide what we want to do. We have control over those decisions. Strategy is uncomfortable. It should make you feel scratchy and scared because you don't have control over it. Your customer has control of it. Your strategy is your theory of how you're going to persuade or influence your customers in your market to move in a direction that helps you win. It is therefore a hypothesis. It is a theory. And like any hypothesis, it should be tested and validated empirically. Um, and it is, there's so much packed into that little bit there, Jason. Organizations between command and control between, um, annual budgeting processes that are highly detailed, rigid, and inflexible organizations that simply whose leadership culture can't embrace ambiguity, like theory-driven decision-making. These are all things that make it really hard to develop and execute strategy well. Well, that's what keeps people like you and me in business though, right? So I guess we should be completely sad about that. But if I'm a CEO or maybe a CPO listening to this and thinking about strategy, want to know if I've got one, uh, whether my strategy is already decaying, like what are the first things I should look at tomorrow, like after I've listened to this, like, what should I check? And first of all, first step to kind of make sure that everything, obviously I could go and get your book and, and, you know, people should do that, but what should I check first off? You know, so the book's all about developing organizational competencies in strategy deployment and strategy execution. And with the side idea that whatever you're investing your scarce capital and capacity in is, is the strategy you're executing. And, um, so first of all, have you successfully deployed your strategic objectives with the clarity, the granularity and appropriateness to each organ of the organization? Um, how do you find that out? Probe every time you're in the, you know, you're, if you're an executive and you're in the elevator and there's three or four people in there say, you know, who's, who's our biggest competitor, which, which market or geography or, um, persona is the focus of, uh, our efforts, uh, to win. What does winning look like? Um, I mean, you get asked to these little questions, these elevator questions, uh, we'll, we'll give any executive a much better idea of how in tune, um, the organization broadly is with your strategy. broadly is with your strategic intent. Um, Pulse surveys are also helpful in this, right? Who's winning you or strategy? Okay. Um, the other side of it is the strategy execution piece. Is the investment portfolio, are the efforts of the employees, payrolls, a huge component of your portfolio. Um, you know, are they focused on the right things and are the things proceeding in a way to deliver the outcomes that you desire to win? And, you know, creating that governance process that has the ability to intercede to detect anomaly intercede rapidly and effectively and get those little Vikings paddling back towards the right shore instead of the rocks. Um, you know, you can't just do that quarterly, you know, that's another. Okay. Our, um, you know, anti-pattern is set them and forget them. Okay. Ours. That's the beginning of the quarter. Let's make up an okay. Oh, it's the end of the quarter. Did we make it? Did we just copy it? We'll copy it to next quarter. It'd be fine. Yeah, exactly. Oh God. You know, maybe we should look at this more than once a quarter. Um, you know, that kind of thing. Nice. Well, hopefully some people will be listening to this and, uh, start to do some of those things or at least think about them. But if people want to come and find you after this and talk about strategy or strategy decay or how to kind of execute their strategy or measure it, or generally just kind of tap you up and get some inspiration for wholesome countryside living, where can I come and find you? Horse training techniques. Yeah. Horse training. Yeah. Good bite some bales of hay. There you go. Um, well, first of all, you know, I, I, I hope people find value in the book. Um, you can learn more about the book at the book's website. Uh, www.adapttowin.co co.com. I couldn't afford the.com there. Uh, somebody already planned it on that. And yeah, they want to like 10 grand for it. So yeah, that co we'll have to do, but you know, it's for sale on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all the places that you would ever want to buy a book. Um, yeah. And, uh, you know, I, I still do some select strategy consulting engagements and, and I love talking about this stuff and, uh, you know, I, I've done a lot of keynote speeches. I've done, um, you know, some, some, uh, sessions at conferences. I like all that stuff. So, uh, certainly open to any of those conversations. Well, I'll make sure to link the book website as well as it and make sure it's a.co as well. Make sure to link that into the show notes and obviously your LinkedIn and everything as well. And hopefully you'll get a few people either worshiping you or coming along and trying to find out more. Well, Evan, thanks for coming on and talking about how strategy actually survives reality and how we can try and avoid it decaying as much as possible. Well, obviously, as we kind of mentioned earlier, the heat death of a strategy is probably coming at some point, uh, hopefully we can stay in touch, but yeah, as for now, thanks for taking the time. Well, it's been delightful, Jason. Thank you for having me along.