1Mike Maddaloni - The Hot Iron

Providing you have the right people - namely ones who are committed to success and humble enough to admit defeat and chance course - it could work.

There should also be an agreed-upon measurement process. Otherwise this sounds a lot like the dot-com I worked for about a decade ago... for exactly 6 months and 5 days!

mp/m

August 4, 2009

2Wayne

Depends on the context really. If you have the staff and resources to let people run around sure it can work. But if you don't then I think you need a defined path, or at least direction. I worked in an organization with no strategy and I think that the urge to just change directions on whims cost us over the long-run. On the other hand, I have seen other creatively-driven efforts work out fabulously (though in lieu of a strategy there is at least a vision in play). For the sake of my (and your) career, I hope the lack-of-strategy strategy doesn't get too popular.

August 4, 2009

3Noah Brier

@Wayne: I agree with you on vision and the right staff, and honestly, the no-strategy strategy is not really the right term for it, since basically you are just going with a bunch of small strategies which you are testing and analyzing and then hopefully bubbling back up into the overall vision.

August 4, 2009

4Adam Singer

As your title points out - even no strategy is in itself a strategy.

August 4, 2009

5Matt Daniels

Your touching a philosophy that I am close to 100% accepting: tactics determine success, not strategy.

I'm finding growing evidence that success hinges on random, unforeseen events. The best that marketers can do is tactically conquer, be it rapid-iterative testing or creating Seth Godin's "purple cow." The small things make the difference, and it's the little nudges that determine whether your content is a dud content or a marketing sensation.

People say that the strategic stuff is important--the segmentation, targeting, and positioning. But I'm realizing that the people claiming such importance or often selling the same idea of clients.

Steve Blank, blogger, has some great stuff on start-ups embracing this iterative-strategy. Just make something--don't front-load the planning. Then test and iterative the hell out of it.

August 4, 2009

6Camiel

Doesn't success also depend on having the right people at your side when you do have a strategy?

This no-strategy thing is something that has been fascinating me ever since I saw Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, in which many aid organizations got tangled in their protocols and action strategies.

The US Coast Guards were an exception, because they threw the game plan out and simply made it their goal to save as many people from New Orleans, as fast as possible, with the few helicopters they had.

Because they acknowledged there wasn't time for a strategy, going into the field without a plan was the best thing to do at that time.

I am sure this would work more often than we'd expect.

August 4, 2009

7@ryost

This is a prime example of Commander's Intent. It's often impossible to plan for every possible contingency or make every decision ahead of time. If you know where you need to go, set the goal, then trust your team to get there; of course, you need a strong team to trust them with this technique.

August 4, 2009

8barbara

Ironic the inspiration for this post came from Teach for America. Sometimes the problem is just getting caught up in jargon. If your goal is learning, you can just meander. When there's a job to do, what works for me are three simple questions:
1 - What do you want to accomplish?
2 - How are you going to accomplish it?
3 - How will you know you accomplished it?

August 4, 2009

9Sriram Venkit

Strategy is linking a bunch of logical steps, and the logic is an assumption (i cud either get a job or not get a job for that). In some fields, time honored, where the dynamics don't change fast, the assumptions are much more educated. You can count on them cos, well, the historic record goes far back it isn't that dynamic. In the modern digital tech world, the eco system is fast changing, there isn't a strong history to make solid assumptions, and it is not expensive to fail. Most importantly you can actually measure with low latency. So the frequency of education and iteration is higher. There are many other eco systems where some or all of these conditions don't exist - like health, for instance, so we'd have to sit in a room and count on our assumptions. [opened up the scope of the comment beyond marketing just cos ur blog is pretty open and i like ur blog for exactly that]

August 5, 2009

10Sriram Venkit

Funny, I'm at Barnes & Nobles reading introductory pages of The Black Swan (and using B&Ns awesome free wifi), and Taleb says "So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can."

August 7, 2009

11stephanie gerson

you may similarly be inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's notion of no-agriculture agriculture, which years ago made me wonder what no-politics politics and other no-x x's might look like.

but as a promiscuous pragmatic pluralist, I have wonder whether there are no circumstances under which strategic plans are warranted. in other words, might different strategies - from super planning to no-strategy strategies - be effective in different circumstances? or would you say agile methodologies are always more effective?

anyways. if you're in the mood for something with familiar verbs but new nouns (same story, different lens), Fukuoka's "The One-Straw Revolution" is pretty fantastic.

August 7, 2009

12Lassi Laitinen

I agree with the sentiment, but there's nothing new in it.

No-strategy strategy is a buzzword for old wisdom that hasn't been internalized widely enough.

The strategy academic, Mr. Henry Mintzberg, has opposed strict top-down strategizing at least since late the 70s when he called rigid organizations machine bureaucracies and started longing for adhocracies.

From 1994:
"The notion that strategy is somethign that should happen way up there, far removed from the details of running an organization on a daily basis, is one of the great fallacies of conventional strategic management."

It's
adhocratic organization you want and you seem to share the
learning school view of strategy.

August 27, 2009