12: Corporate Strategy Always Lacks Detailed Analyses
This is the next podcast for the power sector corporate strategy study we will soon release as part of our Executive Program.
In an earlier podcast, we discussed the logic of the corporate strategy recommendations. It will surprise you to realize just how little detailed analyses support that recommendation. There is a deep and clear logic. Yet, the analyses needed to prove that logic is surprisingly light.
In this podcast, we discuss this paradox of corporate strategy. Strategy studies have a reputation for having lots of analyses. This reputation comes both from a misunderstanding of strategy and from watching other types of strategy studies, like pricing, business unit strategies etc., which require heavy analyses.
What many consider corporate strategy analyses is actually the analyses done for the business units etc., once the corporate strategy is done. They are different and should not be confused.
Corporate strategy is essentially a bet on a market and there is no analytic tool in the world anywhere at any firm that can predict how a market will behave. We need to make a reasonable bet.
We also explain how the corporate strategy can still be right even if the tests we are doing prove otherwise. If you are wondering how to apply this to your own work, you need to focus on business judgment.
More than any other type of strategy work, corporate strategy relies heavily on business judgment since the analyses is dramatically open to interpretation. Business judgement cannot be found in any single analyses since no analyses is going to provide the answer.
We finally, explain why we have developed the corporate strategy approach we have developed if its primary role is not to analyze the corporate strategy recommendations.
Michael Boricki