From our overstocked archives
Sam
Smith, 2009
Have pity on me.
Say a prayer. Drop a penny in the pond on my behalf. In a few
days I have to go to a non-profit's strategic planning meeting.
It's a great organization that does great things, but - like so
many non-profits - it periodically seeks to cleanse and refresh
itself by turning what it does into indecipherable abstractions.
I'll survive and maybe there'll be some good food, but, as a general
rule, I don't do strategic visions.
Still
it's happening all over America. "Strategic plan" and
its semantic variations have appeared on Google seven million
times just in the past month. On the Review's list of cliches
that's right between "empower" and that ultimate expression
of corporate insincerity - "any inconvenience" - you
know, the one for which everyone apologizes.
Strategic planning, in its non-military sense, got
its start at the Harvard Business School in the 1920s. Not long
after we had the Great Depression. The concept had a revival in
the 1980s and contributed to the philosophy and practices that
have left us with the Penultimate Great Depression.
Coincidence, perhaps, but bear in mind that in the
1950s - when the economy was booming - we were turning out only
5,000 MBAs a year. The number of people in business who had any
idea of about strategic planning was minute. By 2005, we were
churning out 142,000 MBAs a year and we had huge trade and budget
deficits, a disappearing auto industry, one of our most costly
and disastrous wars, a growing gap between rich and poor, and
a constantly projected inability to care for our ill or elderly.
Worse, everyone in the country
had been infected by corporate verbiage and values. And, often
unconsciously, much of America had bought into the rightwing and
absurdly simplistic Reaganesque view of life and the very voices
that should have been among the loudest in opposition - non-profits
- signed up as well.
Non-profits
found that it helped to adopt the language of business. It made
them seem responsible rather than just over-idealistic do-gooders.
It also reflected one of the most misguided assumptions of the
educated elite: if one can understand, identify, manipulate and
be loyal to abstract principles, the specifics will obediently
follow.
Editors and reporters,
among others, know better. Reporters run into this sort of language
constantly at news conferences and elsewhere. They have a professional
term for it: bullshit.
And
editors know that a reporter may come up with a great idea for
a story and even have a strategy for carrying it out, but if the
journalist doesn't know how find the right sources, or ask the
right questions and write it all down, the strategy won't work.
Over the past three decades corporations
have done an incredibly effective job of turning Americans into
just so many more corporate employees desperate for a strategic
vision that will foster formulations of actions and processes
to be taken to attain the vision in accordance with agreed upon
procedures in order to achieve a hierarchy of goals. It has -
with bombast, bullying and baloney - convinced an extraordinary
number of Americans that its childishly verbose and coldly abstract
culture is transferable to every human activity from running a
church to driving a tractor across a field.
Unfortunately, life doesn't work like that. You
need to look no farther than the military to see this. During
the post-war period when the US military devoted more effort to
strategic planning that at any time in its history, it has also
had the sorriest record. Over and over, the problem has been an
attractive general principle overwhelmed or sabotaged by reality
and facts.
Now bounce back
150 years to a war in which general strategy was more than balanced
by specific generals. At one point a White House aide complained
of General Grant's drinking and Lincoln invoked his best management
practices - which was to tell the aide to find out what Grant
was drinking and give it to all his other generals. Put that in
your vision statement.
And
the key battle at Little Round Top was won by a general named
Joshua Chamberlain who had studied theology, taught ever subject
except science and math and was fluent in nine languages. He had,
however, never study military strategy.
In any specific situation, a general strategy can
quickly lose value without supporting virtues like wisdom, sufficient
staff, adequate budget, imagination, energy and good fortune.
But of course, if all else fails,
you can always fall back on your mission statement.
Like most people, I never read mission statements
except under duress or when I have nothing better to do, like
standing in the lobby of a pretentious restaurant waiting to be
seated.
Gordon Luk said it well: "The easy and
fun way to test whether a mission statement. . . is garbage is
to negate it and see whether it still holds up. If a mission statement
does not make sense for a company not to do, then why even bother
stating the obvious?
"Striving
to be a leader in a field? Of course you are –
you better not be trying to come in dead last…
"Trying to connect people
to passions or interests? Hell, why not disconnect them instead!.
. .
"Douglas Adams wrote
frequently about the human penchant for continuously stating the
very, very obvious. Mission statements take that principle to
the extreme, to the point where we even believe that we're going
to persuade people about something or other by making an official
public statement about what we are going to do that would be insane
to negate."
Occasionally
a mission statement rises to the occasion. The alternative newspaper
Eat the State had one that read: "Missions were created by
the Catholic Church to subjugate Native Americans in California.
We oppose them." And a small computer consultancy business
in West London posted a sign: 'We are not ruled by a mission statement,
we are smarter than that'. But when you start to count the number
of organizations - from religious to non-profit to social to political
- that feel they can't get along without some gobbledygook on
the inside cover of whatever they're publishing, you know the
corporate cultural invasion is complete.
Which doesn't mean you shouldn't have plans, think
about where you're going, discuss alternatives and figure out
what you do best. But the better model should be the pragmatism,
inventiveness and realism of small business culture which still
provides most of America's new jobs - as many as 75 percent in
some experts' view. Most small business people don't have time
to sit around a table coming up with empty adjectives to describe
their efforts. And they tend to call the people who buy their
stuff customers rather than stakeholders, which makes sense, given
that the pre-corporate definition of stakeholder was someone who
held the bet during a gambling match and handed it over to the
winner. Not a particularly exciting or profitable role in life.
Here's how David
Weinberger put in back in 1999:
"Mission
statements are vapid because they think of business as a march
to a goal or a war of conquest. Businesses are far more complex
than that. . . Further, missions are things you accomplish and
are done with. Businesses, on the other hand, generally aim for
long-term existence. The board doesn't get together and say, "Well,
we've accomplished our mission of being the world's leading supplier
of high quality wombats to blind gombricks, so I guess we can
just shut it all down now. Good job, lads!"
"Businesses often are more like farming than
like making war. How can we get maximum sustainable yield from
this ground? And what happens when the ground changes radically?
Are we going to keep trying to grow potatoes in the layer of ash,
or are we going to see this as a splendid opportunity to succeed
with ash-loving radishes?
"So,
yes, write up something about your commitment to treating your
customers well, building great products, and contributing to the
lives of your employees and your community. Heck, even admit that
you're in it for the money. But one thing is certain: if your
mission statement achieves the usual goal of fitting on the back
of a business card, then it's just about guaranteed to be empty
of anything worth saying."
Which
is why I don't look forward to my afternoon of strategic planning.
We will declare, no doubt, some fine principles, but life is controlled
not by the glories of the grand but by the uncertainties, blessings
and perversities of the specific. It is in organizing the latter
in some rational, useful, imaginative and, yes, enjoyable fashion
that life becomes better. As Benjamin Franklin noted, happiness
is not the result of great strokes of good fortune, but of the
"little felicities" of every day.
Meanwhile, if you are still curious about my personal
vision statement, please consult my optometrist.
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