BR37
This edition of Bright Objects (#BR37) is about how strategy will save your business from operating in the most crushing competitive market ever. It’s about becoming a weather-maker over a weather-taker. And it’s about hard work.
Speaking of hard work: never let it be said that we do things by halves around here.
4 weeks ago, I'd never heard of Alex M H Smith. 3 weeks ago, I was reading his book, No Bullshit Strategy. 2 weeks ago, I wrote about him in Bright Objects. Last week I interviewed him on Slideshow with Dave Hayward.
Watch episode 10 season 2 (#23) - with Alex M H Smith
On Slideshow we talk about why your strategic moat is crumbling, and what to do about it
I'm always on the hunt for a good framework, a way of thinking about things. And Alex has a brilliant way of figuring out whether your strategy is actual strategy or merely dressed-up goals, generic plans..... or beautiful fluff.
We’re in a competitive era we maybe haven’t seen in generations
Alex has a compelling, rather sobering thesis: we're in the most competitive era of all time, and having a good product and working hard is no longer enough.
This has many symptoms, but one of them hit rather close to home for me (and I’m sure many of you will wince when you hear it):
I think the lifestyle business is dead. If you want a lifestyle business, there's only one left. And it's called a job."
Yikes. I feel very seen (writing from my home office). Mind you, being the son of entrepreneurs, I never had any illusions that working for yourself was easier or less work than having a job.
Don’t be lame and call yourself a fractional CMO….
As we talked through the “lifestyle business” and what it means, he called out the classic form: "If you're a fractional CMO..."
Aw gawd. I’ve called myself that, especially when I brought Europa back full-time 2-3 years ago. Fractional CMO does have this particular kind of cringe attached to it, maybe because it’s marketers who came up with the title… I’m pretty sure it’s still on the website.
Why we brought it up: his point is that it only takes one person in that pool who isn't treating it as a lifestyle, one person who's up all night pulling every lever at their disposal, and they'll crush everyone who just wants to pick the kids up from school.
The moat that most businesses have is basically that they were prepared to do the hard work to get a degree of traction in an industry that has got fundamentally low ROI. So basically, their moat is that other people could not be bothered to do what they're doing."
The bullshit test
So what do you do? Start by testing whether you have an actual strategy.
Alex sees three types of bullshit strategy.
Goals dressed up as a plan. "Our strategy is to become the supplier of choice in our industry." That's a desire. "You need to be giving your team an instruction. Nothing wrong with wanting to be number one, but you need to say: we're gonna become number one, and the way we are gonna do it is by doing X."
Plans so generic any competitor could run them. Hire five more salespeople. Expand into a new geography. Update your product line. All probably necessary. None of them gives you an edge. His rule of thumb: "If your competitors could say or do it too, it's not strategy."
Fluff. Something that sounds visionary but nobody can execute. I threw in the "start with why" era (ugh!), and Alex agreed: people confused purpose with strategy for years, and you'd end up with something like "Our strategy is to elevate the human spirit via B2B." Beautiful. Useless.
And the reason smart people keep falling for all three?
Because you can get away with it. Until recently, you could be completely reactive, work hard, do best practice, and the natural moats of incompetence would result in you being able to run a successful business."
Write your strategy as prose
To win, Alex also argues you should write your strategy as prose. A 600-word essay. No slides, no bullet points. His benchmark: Elon Musk's 2006 (presumably pre-ketamine overuse) blog post, Tesla's Secret Master Plan.
It’s two paragraphs. Before the first car launched: Here's what we've noticed. Here's what everyone else is getting wrong. Here's what we're doing instead. "Off they went, and it worked exactly the way he spelt it out."
"Strategy is an argument," Alex says. "It is not a list of initiatives."
Most businesses never get there. "We are like ships on the sea, but we don't actually plot a course. We think being the captain means making sure the decks are clean and the crew are happy. And we never go anywhere."
3 steps to de-bullshit your strategy
Run your strategy through the bullshit test. Print it out. Read each line. Is it a goal dressed up as a plan? Could a competitor say the same thing? Is it beautiful but unexecutable? Cross out everything that fails. What's left is what you actually have.
Write what survives as prose. Not slides, not bullets. An essay that says: here's what we've noticed about our market, here's what everyone else is getting wrong, here's what we're doing instead. If you can't write it, you don't have a strategy yet.
Read it to someone on your team and ask them to argue with it. If they can't tell you why it will work, or if they just nod politely, you've written fluff. A real strategy should provoke a reaction, because it's making a bet.
Becoming a weather-maker
Alex calls it the difference between a weather-maker and a weather-taker. You need to be the one making the weather in your industry. And once you reconcile yourself to that, he says, it's actually quite fun. It's fun to be ambitious. It's fun to have a mission that's connected to the commercial engine of your business, not to saving the whales.
The weather makers are the ones still having fun.
If you want to do some weather-making AND have fun, you could do a lot worse than work with me. If you’re in the market for a brand and marketing strategist, I’m your guy. Unless you want a fractional CMO….
Cheers, Dave
Sources / further reading
No Bullshit Strategy, Alex M.H. Smith: Unity Books | Goodreads
Alex M.H. Smith on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-m-h-smith
Basic Arts newsletter: basicarts.org
Slideshow show page (all links) Europa
Slideshow ep10 se02 Alex M H Smith YouTube
Slideshow ep10 se02 Alex M H Smith Spotify