Changing your strategy is changing your World

Securing or developing turnover is often the task of the big boss. Facing this goal, there are two potential difficulties.

His first challenge is to come up with a new strategy.

Easy? Not that much, because the World he belongs to filters his ability to design a new strategy. In other words, his World limits the strategy he could access to.

His second challenge is to involve his company into the implementation of this new strategy

…. Apart from an incremental strategy, it is unlikely that the World of the company he manages will easily implement the new strategy. Why? Because the execution capacity cannot be claimed, it is only the result of a World, close to the new strategy. Just to remember, introducing many times the new strategy to the employees does not work.

Two operational examples to make the two difficulties concrete

The traditional circuses collapse – first example of the difficulty

Why? Mainly because boss-owners of companies cannot understand the expectations of their potential audience. Their greatness is to keep what their grandparents created. The audience thinks totally obsolete the sight of a few animals obeying to a trainer holding a whip, or watching acrobatics less impressive than Tom Cruise’s in any american blockbuster.

On the other side, new circuses understood they could deal with the strategy differently, talking about dreams and poetry, so obtaining record attendance.  However these new managers do not come from famous family circus and the World associated.

Changing your strategy is changing your World!                 

The DCNS has difficulties to convince its managers to agree with the new firm project – Second example of difficulty

An Echo (French newspaper) article from 2010 summarizes this issue: “One year after the launch, the big DCNS development plan called “Championship” has difficulties to gain a foothold. This project, which aims to a 50% growth in the next 10 years and a competitive win of 30%, should increase the power of the military shipyard building against the worldwide competition.”

“How managers see themselves reveals an operational culture, which does not give the priority to the result” says Patrick Boissier, DCNS’ CEO. He summarizes perfectly the necessary World change of his company.

The same article adds that “In respect to the 30% competitive win, this is the net revenue growth which will reveal it”… this quote seems wrong to us: in a World where the greatness is not the result, no one will be interested in productivity benefits. Even worse, this goal reveals a lack of greatness because the actual World productivity is the opposite of the operational performance.

Changing your strategy is changing your World!

Bruno Jourdan