The business strategist.

A business strategist helps an organization, together with its owners and board, decide what to do and what not to do. In the video below I say it in just over a minute, in Italian. On this page I explain what it means in practice, where it applies, and why the hardest part is the second half of the sentence.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

A business strategist does something very simple, in theory.

He helps an organization, together with its owners and board, decide what to do and what not to do. Put that way it sounds trivial, but it really isn’t.

The business strategist goes into companies, projects and institutions and, basically, puts priorities in order.

He shows which initiatives are creating value and which are performing on empty and only using up resources.

He realigns goals, people and processes when they start pulling in different directions.

And then he builds clear criteria for choosing.

Often he does not give ready-made answers, but he certainly asks the right questions.

He is not a manager in the strict sense, because he does not run day-to-day operations.

He is definitely not a coach.

The business strategist is the one who works on the system, but from a different angle, with the ability to turn business strategy into a broad cultural act.

It is work that is rarely seen from the outside.

But when it is missing, you feel it.

Deciding what not to do is the hardest part

In 1996 Michael Porter published an article in the Harvard Business Review called What Is Strategy?, and to answer the question he told the story of two airlines. Southwest Airlines had chosen not to do many things: no meals on board, no assigned seats, no baggage transfers to other airlines’ flights, no premium classes. Thanks to those trade-offs it could turn a plane around at the gate in fifteen minutes and keep it flying more hours than its competitors.

A business strategist helps owners and boards decide what to do and what to stop doing.

Continental Airlines saw Southwest’s results and tried to match them without giving anything up. It created Continental Lite: it dropped meals and first class, added departures and lowered fares, but kept the rest of the traditional airline around it, with its hubs, its connecting baggage and its travel agents. Planes piled up delays at the hubs and complaints reached a thousand a day. According to Porter, the company lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the CEO lost his job.

From this Porter draws a line I often quote: the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Without trade-offs, he adds, there would be no need for choice, and so no need for strategy.

Inside a company it is the most tiring part of the work, for a very human reason: every initiative has someone who wanted it. Stopping it means contradicting a person, sometimes the owners themselves. It takes a view that is not tied to any of the initiatives under way. That is why, when people ask me what deciding what not to do means in practice, I answer that it is often the most useful decision, and the hardest.

An initiative can work well and still be wrong

More than thirty years before Porter, in 1963, Peter F. Drucker wrote a line in the same magazine that has since circulated in many versions. The original says: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

The article it comes from, Managing for Business Effectiveness, is more concrete than its most famous line. Drucker observed that in a business very few events, ten to twenty percent at most, produce ninety percent of the results, while the rest generate most of the costs. And he noted that time, work and money go first to problems rather than to opportunities for growth, and then to activities where even extraordinary success would change little.

An initiative can work well and still be the wrong one: strategy begins where efficiency is no longer enough.

In the video I talk about initiatives that perform without creating value. Anyone who has run a company recognizes them: the product that sells just well enough never to be questioned, the trade fair you go to every year because you always have. None goes badly enough to alarm anyone. Together, they use up the resources the few things that take the company where it has decided to go would need, and separating one from the other is a business strategist’s first job.

Where a business strategist works

The work falls into four areas, plus three services that have a page of their own. Analysis tools (the SWOT matrix, PESTEL analysis, Porter’s five forces) are useful in all of them, but they are the starting point: the real work begins when choices have to be made.

Direction and priorities

With the owners and the board we decide what to do and what not to do: which initiatives to stop, which to rethink, which to strengthen, and with what criteria to choose from now on. It is the part described on this page, the one the others rest on, and the first section of My work. The underlying idea is business strategy, which has its own entry in Words.

Organization and culture

Goals, people and processes tend to pull in different directions, especially as a company grows. Realigning them means working on roles, delegation and company culture, including the language people use every day. It often also means coordinating groups of professionals, inside and outside the company, who each work well on their own and badly together.

Identity and positioning

Before communicating, a company has to know what it is and what it is not. I work on this with the owners and, when needed, with agencies and marketing leads, alongside them and not in their place. Brand awareness, visual identity, campaigns and content come afterward, and they come out better.

Digital and processes

Digital transformation, processes, data, customer experience: these are tools that serve choices about direction, not choices in themselves. A business intelligence system is useful if someone has decided first which numbers to look at, and why.

International expansion, artificial intelligence, training

Three services have a page of their own. With international expansion I prepare Italian companies for international standards and take them into the United States. With AI in your company I build the adoption strategy before the tools are chosen. With in-company training I bring these topics to the people who have to put them into practice.

Neither manager nor coach: work on the whole organization

The business strategist is often confused with other roles, and there is a reason: it is connecting work which, when it works, stays almost invisible. A manager leads people and answers for the daily work. A coach works with one person. The business strategist works with the owners and the board, and the difference between a business strategist, a manager and a coach lies in the position, before the skills.

The business strategist does not run operations and does not work on one person: he works on the whole organization, and leaves written criteria for choosing even when he is not there.

A job that consists of saying what not to do carries a risk, and it is worth naming: becoming a brake. A strategist who just stops other people’s initiatives leaves the company more cautious, not stronger. That is why the work ends with written criteria, which the company uses to choose on its own even when the strategist is not there.

Where this job comes from

The business strategist is often where a career made of other jobs leads. Mine went through photography, graphic design, art direction and management in communications, where I have worked since 2004; in 2008 I founded Tadao Agency, and I have worked in business strategy since 2015. Underneath there is a classical, humanities education that still shapes the way I look at companies.

Knowing those jobs from the inside is useful every day. It lets me talk with agencies, designers and suppliers in their own language, and understand when a creative choice fits the strategy and when it contradicts it. As I say in the video, it is work that is hard to see from the outside: if anything, you recognize it in the choices of a company that knows where it is going and what it has decided to leave behind.

What to do and what not to do

• List the initiatives under way and ask, for each one, whether it moves the company in the chosen direction.
• Stop or rethink the ones that work without leading anywhere, even when someone is attached to them.
• Write down the criteria for choosing, so that the company uses them even without the strategist.
• Do not ask a business strategist to run operations in place of the people responsible for them.
• Do not mistake an initiative’s efficiency for proof that it is needed.

Sources

• Michael E. Porter, “What Is Strategy?”, Harvard Business Review, November–December 1996, pp. 61–78. https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy
• Peter F. Drucker, “Managing for Business Effectiveness,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 1963. On the exact wording of the quote: Quote Investigator, 2017. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/02/09/efficient/