Bad Strategy Advice

I belong to a business owner peer group organization. The organization has a platform for members to engage with each other. The usual forum structure is where members ask questions, and people respond. The amount of bad advice I see as responses is staggering. With very little information or context, respondents throw out solutions that have little chance of being appropriate. A consistent area of bad advice is around strategy.

Strategy is frequently misunderstood, and many people who purport to be strategy advisors don’t understand it. Why is strategy so hard? It requires intellectual and emotional honesty. Company leaders must be willing to deal with their companies’ challenges, opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses without being defensive and protectionist. Second, strategy is a process, and processes can be intimidating and scary for people who haven’t experienced it before. Third, strategy work is hard. Strategy isn’t a set of random goals, a fancy mission statement, or a group of lofty values. Coming up with a sound strategy requires time, effort, and energy with no shortcut or winging it.

Recently, here is some bad strategy advice I have seen that makes me cringe:

• Goals: Define your goals and work back from there. Although goals should be an important consideration as part of any strategy work, simply identifying goals isn’t enough. It often…