The Joker: Do I really look like a guy with a plan?...I just... do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans... they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

This is how I feel about "strategy sessions", these "strategy sessions" are almost always held by businessmen wannabes and lead to nothing but bullshit and guesses presented as facts.

Just go out and do it then come back with your findings now you have facts that you can work with.

Joker's tactics were used to execute on his overall strategy of robbing banks for a specific goal, getting close to specific people.

   Have a plan, but know that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. 

So don't take Sriram's advice too literally. He's not saying "Don't plan". He's not saying "Don't ever think about strategy". What he's saying is, like everything in life, do it with moderation.

"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." --Patton

While the lack of such corporations do not automatically show the usefulness of strategy sessions, they do put the onus on you to prove otherwise if you are taking the position that they are almost never of much use.

HP? RIM? (</snark>)

Just because you do something, does not mean you're good at it.

If you're going to use a word, use it. If not, don't. Fuck.

I don't think nudity is obscene either, but I can see why people might want to remain private. Just because I know what a nipple looks like doesn't mean I know what YOUR nipple looks like.

And of course, to a large segment of the population striking out bare breasts makes the picture a lot less agreeable.

I will agree that it is exactly the same situation.

If you have 500.000 soldiers, someone has to think about how to use this force in a smart way. Otherwise it will be a mess and nobody knows what to do or end up fight each other.

There are not a lot of people in an army who can define the strategy. Within the hierarchy there are levels of strategy but then also: people executing > people thinking.

In the corporate world, this is the other way around. Following the Dilbert principle, organisations are full of people "analyzing" and "researching" without any mandate or power. This results in endless meetings without any purpose. But it sounds acceptable if they call it "strategy".

Meaning while the advice is good it doesn't address the actual problem which is getting those Senior VPs to either (a) eliminate their own jobs or (b) start churning out some code. Neither of which seems likely.

    Extremes are harmful.  Be balanced.

    Right ‘strategy’ in place before doing anything

    reams and reams of text written...

    Flexibility to do random things

The balance is hard to strike, but is something to strive for!

This post was me trying to figure out where the 'right way' to do things lie.

Here's the problem. On one hand, you have the lessons from Google being too random and them winding up at 'more wood, fewer arrows'

On the other hand, I've seen first hand the effects of a bunch of very smart people focused on one strategy - which happens to be the wrong one. If you look at Microsoft in the early 2000s, their strategy around how to deal with the web and recognizing the threat it posed to Windows is out of the book. I've seen some very smart people articulate why it's the right thing to ignore search and ads in 2004/2005. And obviously, it was horribly wrong.

As someone who wants to run a company, I find it fascinating to study how companies deal with these situations and how you can design your culture to avoid it( and without the fix being 'be as talented as Steve Jobs'). I hope the post doesn't come across as bashing MSFT as it isn't about that - MSFT is a good reference model for myself personally since I saw how internal decision making worked there.

Unfortunately, the overlords with all their experience, should know better.

Edit: I should also add that being inside academia, I have seen some stuff which was said to be revolutionary, and indeed did change a lot of things, but only in the narrow scope of academic research. My comment was about the direct real world impact.

And also about the value of revolution to the first revolutionaries--it's common to see the first movers fall, and later opportunists capitalize on the momentum they started.

I think "strategic" is a little elaborate for Apple's actual plans since Jobs took over. Aside from the initial jump from computers to consumer electronics, the only actual strategic decisions Apple made were along the lines of "what products should we try to create?", "does this product still suck or should we release it soon?", and maybe the switch to Intel processors. They didn't fall into the trap of thinking about second-order shit like image or positioning or market or the economy, they just tried to figure out what would be a great product they could make, and what products and concepts were worth pursuing or not.

Or the abandonment of support for clone hardware?

Or the decision to go into the media business by inventing the iTunes store -- but not to rely on media as the primary profit center, but rather as a way of driving sales of extremely profitable hardware?

Or the decision to base iOS on Mac OS X, but not to make them exactly the same thing, with the same apps running on both platforms?

Or the myriads of strategic decisions around the App Store, such as the strict review policy, or the pricing model?

Or even the decision to keep Flash off of iOS, at the possible cost of good relations with Adobe, a company that has traditionally been a bulwark of the Mac OS creative scene?

Or are you trying to deny that these are strategic decisions?

(Note that this is not meant to be an exhaustive list. For example, Tim Cook's list of strategic manufacturing decisions has got to be twice this size, but it's also composed of items that remain secret, or that I don't know about or understand. But why have companies been struggling for years now to match Apple's hardware prices? That's not a fortunate accident.)

One of Tim Cook's strategic manufacturing decisions, as I recall, was to literally corner the market of NAND flash memory since the heyday of the iPod. Apple did and probably still does preorder a commanding proportion of the world's NAND flash production every year. Is that a strategic decision or just the natural consequence of consistently forecasting that you'll need that much NAND flash?

It sounds like I'm minimizing everything by deeming it "not strategic", but if you're going to characterizing the work Apple does, I don't think you'd be that far off characterizing it as intelligent people working out the natural consequences of a very small number of strategic decisions. If you're Apple, and you're going to make a touchscreen phone that doesn't suck, using Mac OS X technology, keeping Flash off, setting up the App Store the way it is are all consequences of that.

These products weren't discontinued because Apple was incapable of executing them. They were discontinued because the strategy of maintaining a one-stop-shop ecosystem, in which a niche of customers would buy not only their computer but also their printer and scanner from Apple, was rejected in favor of the strategy in which the mass market would buy single best-of-breed products from Apple.

Those aren't just two strategies; they're two diametrically opposing strategies.

Yes, the strategic shift you point out was immense, but it was also a market shift in response to Apple's products. It wasn't until the iPod took off that Apple's position in the market changed any, they just went from selling 12 poorly differentiated lines of Macs to 4 or 5, but to the same niche. Apple can't strategically will themselves into a mass market, the most they can do is create products that might have a broader appeal than Macs do.

You seem to be saying, "Jobs' Apple didn't so much 'focus' as simply kill bad products".

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle; the strategic shift wasn't so much from complexity to simplicity as it was from niche to mass market. Some things were killed because they were crappy, others because they didn't have mass market appeal (for instance, custom-branded printers and digital cameras).

Apple seems to have been on a trend towards escalating revenue and improving margins long before the iPod was released; see for instance the historical 10Q's on "Wikivest" (whatever that is).

I think by Apple's standards, anything that doesn't surpass the competition is a crappy product; at the very least it's not a product worth making. Apple had digital cameras and laser printers; what they didn't have was a way to do either product better than everyone else. Focus is certainly part of it, but Apple is less focused now than they were in 1999. Admittedly, compared to any other company, Apple still has extraordinary focus.

It's more my point that it's easy to imagine a world where a minority of Apple fanboys have all the Macs and iPhones and iPads, while Windows and Android rule the mass market. It's execution, not strategy--operational, marketing, retailing, and engineering execution--that makes the difference.

Strategy is a process to reach the target & not a target/goal in itself. Unfortunately, many senior executives think that strategy is all about the end goal & end up creating wrong strategies. Mostly, the middle management will hear these end goal strategies & have no idea about its usefulness. This defeats the purpose & the middle management ends up wasting more time in meetings & wasting more time instead of being more focused.

Hell, I don't think a strategy session came up with the app store, It was just a creation that fit the moment.

The concept is exactly similar to significant digits in science, which is to say understand the experiment and the parameters to know who many significant digits you can count on and don't bother with the rest.

I wonder (because I forgot) who did people used to fawn over, or hold up on a pedestal, or revere, or look up to, before Apple came out with the iPod and all this other greatness of the last decade?

Who was doing it well before Apple came along and became the go-to example for everything?

The industry always wants to emulate the current leader, forgetting that there are a myriad of different strategies available. That's because collectively, given the limited space in news headlines, we're not much smarter than a school of fish. However, individually we can each do better by reading enough history and being focused on and aware of our personal circumstances.

Actually, I think large companies can afford to be far more strategic than your average startup.

Large companies can afford to dink around with unsuccessful, random projects. Startups have such few resources that you absolutely need to focus and hope you're down the right path. Constantly re-evaluating and 'pivoting' can absolutely be part of your strategy too.