YOU ARE A STRATEGIST

Lobkovich, a business strategy coach, explains how to create a strategic vision and successfully implement it in this manual.

According to the author, big ideas are not enough for success. One needs a well-defined vision to make those ideas a reality, as well as an organizational culture that supports them. Most companies have something akin to a grand mission statement, but it usually isn’t composed in a way that renders it immediately actionable, says the author. What’s often missing, she says, is a “connective tissue to tie strategy to implementation,” which she calls an “alignment layer…between strategy and delivery”—an important insight that one doesn’t see often enough in literature on the topic. Without this, there can be a fatal distance between aspiration and accomplishment. The author offers two tools that aim to solve these problems: a “Connected Strategic One-Sheet” and a “No-BS Objectives and Key Results” or “OKR” form. The former is a one-page summation of one’s overarching strategic vision that promotes organizational clarity to make alignment more likely. The OKRs “fill the gap between high-level strategy and tactical implementation,” Lobkovich writes, by articulating a “goal framework” that establishes empirically measurable results, as well as clear marks of individual accountability and shared responsibility. This lucidity encourages employees to collaborate and experiment, she asserts, and even take risks, as these goals can be understood, in part, as aspirational. In impressively clear and detailed language, accompanied by numerous charts and illustrations, the author explains how one can effectively compose both documents. However, it sometimes leans of clichés of the business-book genre (“Normalize curiosity”), including obligatory references to behavioral science regarding human motivation that ultimately add nothing valuable to the author’s argument. However, the book does supply genuinely practical counsel in step-by-step form, which is likely to be helpful to anyone who wants to “unblock [their] own inner strategist.”

A helpful guide to pursuing business goals, despite familiar platitudes.