Too Busy for Strategy?

Harvard Business Review once gave it the headline treatment: if strategy is so important, why don’t we make time for it? (opens in a new tab)

Good question. And I suspect the truth is uncomfortable: for a lot of leaders, strategy isn’t actually that important. If it were, they would be spending time on it. Budgets and calendars tell you more about priorities than anything said at the offsite.

Or maybe it’s less about priorities and more about simply being overwhelmed. That’s easier to fix, and the first step is noticing it, then admitting it.

“We’re too busy right now”

We sometimes hear this in the conversations where a company decides whether to start strategic work at all.

Some of the leaders we talk to are genuinely excited about category design and what it could do for their company. But they don’t get started. It isn’t the money. It’s time. It comes down to “we’re too busy right now.” A few say it outright, and I respect that. Others take a little longer to get there.

About a year ago, at a trade show in Amsterdam, I met a CEO whose company seemed like a great fit. We had a great conversation, then a follow-up meeting at their offices, and he asked to pick things up again “in a few weeks.” I checked back in a few weeks later, and again after that. Months later, he was still a few weeks away from being ready to commit.

Time is a budget too

Putting tactical work ahead of strategic work is a fair choice. A leadership team allocates its time the same way it allocates money and people, and choosing not to make room for strategic thinking is as much a decision as any budget line. (By strategic thinking I don’t mean “I had an idea while walking the dog this morning, let’s spin up a new product.”)

If you want to know which decision your team has made, look at its calendar for the last quarter and count the hours spent on where the company is going, as opposed to what’s due this week. If the answer is close to zero, that’s the decision.

Just don’t claim that strategy is important, then.

What waiting actually costs

There’s a chart for that. Internally we call it our compound progress chart, and some of us call it the “I’m too busy right now” chart. (Yes, we still need to wordsmith that.)

It shows something obvious that’s still worth repeating every so often: start today, and three months from now you’ll be much further along than if you had waited two months to begin. Every delayed start means reaching cruising altitude later, and usually arriving later too (just ask your favorite airline). In business terms, that’s a later prototype, a later launch, later first customers, a missed year-end number.

With category design, a delayed start is even riskier: while you’re too busy, someone else gets the chance to define the market category you were planning to own. And every “few weeks” is another delayed start.

Making time for strategy rarely takes a quarter off. It takes deciding that it matters, and putting it on the calendar before the week fills it.

If you’d like help with the strategic part, let’s talk. And if the timing isn’t right, I promise we won’t hound you about it.

An earlier version of this appeared as a short series of posts and a video (opens in a new tab) on Forward Momentum’s LinkedIn page in July 2024.