You Should Always Be Talking About Strategy feat. Jesper B. Sørensen

Making strategy requires undertaking major―often irreversible―decisions aimed at long-term success in an uncertain future. Are you looking to think more clearly and build transparent, functional teams that work in a better, streamlined way?

Jesper Sørensen is joining us to help you out. He is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford GSB, and the author of “Making Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage.”

Listen as Greg and Jesper touch on consequential assumptions, the process of pivoting, constructive argumentation and discuss why do people dread those annual strategy meetings.

Episode Quotes:

The dreaded strategy meeting:

So I think that's one part of it, stop thinking about strategy as something you only do once a year. You should always be talking about strategy. Like you should always be thinking about events that happen and things that work and that don't work in terms of the strategy. But in so many organizations strategy is this thing that happens once a year, it happens in the C-suite right? And a consulting firm comes in and tells me what the strategy is.

Power and politics within organizations:

Politics is a positive thing when done well, right? Cause it's about balancing different agendas and that's what organizations are, they’re constellations of people with different goals and you're trying to get them all to march in the same direction. 

But I think It's much more likely to succeed if there is a broader kind of understanding, it's okay, whatever we're going to do, our minimum criteria is it has to make sense. And we have a standard for whether it makes sense which is I can see the logic of it and I can see it in the logic of being coherent.

Jesper’s mantra:

JESPER: My favorite kind of slogan that I came up with during the process of doing this was this idea of - in the process of strategy formulation, really the mantra should be “Validity Today, Soundness Tomorrow.” Which means - 

GREG: I really like that 

JESPER: Yeah, strategy formulation, right, is about an uncertain future. You can't know the truth of all of your assumptions. And at least if you are certain of the truth of all your assumptions, then it's probably not a very exciting strategy because there's no risk and therefore less reward.

Show Links:

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Stanford Graduate School of Business
• Jesper B. Sørensen on Linkedin
• Jesper B. Sørensen on Twitter
• Jesper B. Sørensen on Quartz

His work:

• Jesper B. Sørensen on Google Scholar
• Making Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage