I've summarized strategy consulting, at least in my work, in this way:
- Understanding what is happening, while it is happening.
- Understanding what is likely to happen next.
- Understanding what to do, to affect what is likely to happen next.
While this sounds trivial - I once put these bullets on a slide with a baby playing with a few ABC alphabet blocks - it's difficult to do in practice.
My first career was in science, and everyone knows science is difficult (at least by the yardstick that things often don't work.) This can be less obvious in business. The economist Ludwig van Mises, a libertarian capitalist and fervent anti-communist, framed Lenin as an idiot in the following way. Lenin was asked, after the workers take over the factories, how will the factories be managed? According to von Mises, Lenin replied that it would be trivial, as modern business management was simply a matter of accounting. Even in the 1940s and 1950s, von Mises thought this was absurd, and today, no one thinks Steve Jobs' success was based on taking one or two accounting classes.
The same idea was brought home by Harvard Business School cases we worked through in MBA school - the case studies are often open ended, maddening lack a single right answer, and often demonstrate that seemingly articulate managers (in the cases) had no actual idea what was going on or how to solve it.
And again the same point is made right on the opening page of two very different books - "Creating Public Value," by Mark Moore of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (1995), and in "The Moment of Clarity," a business strategy book by Madsbjerg and Rasmussen (2014).
"Creating Public Value" focuses on what makes good government, but opens with the vignette of a librarian confronted with a library that was increasingly awash in noisy school children from 3 to 6 pm. Is the correct response to corral the kids or even discourage them - "the influx disrupted the library." Or was it to redefine the purpose of the library, to repurpose its array of its resources, to "reengineer" the library in the face of a changing environment? In "Moment of Clarity," written twenty years later and for a wholly different audience, the opening page is a sports equipment executive asking bewildered in 2002: "Is yoga a sport?" His company made sports equipment - footballs, basketballs, the tools of competition - but the marketplace seemed to start tilting away from that and towards yoga mats, running shoes, home ellipticals - not "sports" equipment. The best way he could frame his frustration at the changing environment was concise: "Is yoga a sport?"
When we look at trends in healthcare today - accountable care organizations, bundling and care episodes replacing "coverage decisions," and digital health - we should probably be asking questions that are as puzzled and revealing as, "Is yoga a sport?"
