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 wonderful 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.
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 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-WWII period when the US military devoted more effort to strategic planning than 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 every subject except science and math and was fluent in nine languages. He had, however, never studied 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.
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