The Art of Strategy Is About Knowing When to Say No | Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies | John McPhee revisits story ideas he had but never pursued

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Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium The Art of Strategy Is About Knowing When to Say No    In Hubspot’s early days as a startup, CEO Brian Halligan prided himself on being a “yes man” — saying yes to every exciting and half-way feasible idea someone on his team pitched. But this eventually resulted in a chaotic lack of focus for his employees. So, he learned to say no. To say no strategically, the company developed a tool called the MSPOT. With it, they articulate their Mission, the constituencies they Serve, the Plays they’re going to run this year, the plays they are going to Omit, and how they will Track their progress. Using this tool has allowed Halligan and his team to be more careful about how they spend their time, money, and other limited resources. When HubSpot was in its earliest stages, I used to say yes to almost anything: new features, new initiatives, new ideas. It empowered my team to move fast and get things done. I prided myself on being a “yes” man. We were working hard on getting product-market fit right, so anything we could do to get more customers and to find the right feature mix was a critical learning opportunity. Continued here You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Many Strategies Fail Because They're Not Actually Strategies    Many strategy execution processes fail because “new strategies” are often not strategies at all. A real strategy involves a clear set of choices that define what the firm is going to do and what it’s not going to do. Many strategies fail to get implemented because they do not represent such a set of clear choices. And many so-called strategies are in fact goals. “We want to be the number one or number two in all the markets in which we operate” is one of those. It does not tell you what you are going to do; all it does is tell you what you hope the outcome will be. But you’ll still need a strategy to achieve it. Another reason why many implementation efforts fail is that executives see it as a pure top-down, two-step process: “The strategy is made; now we implement it.” That’s unlikely to work. A successful strategy execution process is seldom a one-way trickle-down cascade of decisions. Continued here John McPhee revisits story ideas he had but never pursued    To ferret out the best talent, ask practitioners in that field. Attend the doctors’ doctor, seek counsel from the lawyer other lawyers retain. So it goes with journalism. John McPhee, aged 92, is a writer’s writer. A father of literary non-fiction, he has tackled subjects as varied as fishing and oranges in his 32 books and 60 years writing articles for the New Yorker. His book on geology, “Annals of the Former World”, won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction in 1999. (He has been a finalist for the prize four times.) “Tabula Rasa”, Mr McPhee’s latest book, is different from what has come before. It is a compilation of the many “saved-up, bypassed, intended pieces of writing” he flirted with but did not pursue. At the outset, he compares the project to Mark Twain’s autobiography, a series of anecdotes and ruminations dictated in his crepuscular years. Mr McPhee calls his and Twain’s efforts “old-people projects”: attempts to fight mortality by tackling something that defies completion. As a young writer, he marvelled at this sort of quest, when Thornton Wilder, an older playwright who left Mr McPhee “moon-, star- and awestruck” at a lunch meeting, described his latest venture. Wilder was cataloguing the 431 surviving plays of Lope de Vega, a Spanish playwright born in 1562. “Why would anyone want to do that?” a perplexed Mr McPhee asked Wilder. Only now, later in life, does he understand: it was something “to do, and do, and do. It beat dying. It was a project meant not to end.” That is why Mr McPhee specifies that “Tabula Rasa” is only “volume one”. He is already working on the next instalment. Continued here

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