Category Archives: Writing

I have apprehended that strategy is the design and story of a series of mechanisms to meet the needs of a series of people. Strategy, as defined, can be applied to organizations (governments, businesses, NGOs), defined units of people (relationships, families) and to individuals. The key difference between the traditional application of strategy (an approach to meeting a goal) is the notion that no goal exists in a vacuum. Every goal is actually a conversation and outcomes for and between people (or the environment / animals / plants, but I’ll stick to the humanist perspective here). So how might the leaders and members of businesses (perhaps the most goal-obsessed human groupings) build strategies that more effectively meet the needs of the humans they have relationships with? First, it’s important to acknowledge the bind business leaders are in when they look beyond one particular set of needs in their ecosystem. The paranoia that investors feel about getting their returns and achieving the most powerful force in the universe forever has created an extraordinarily powerful mechanism for ensuring that dividends and stock values never go down and always go up. Principal-agent problems aside, the triumph of the orientation of business leaders around the stock price is essentially total. So saving for another time the far more difficult issue of changing the expectations of investors and their relationship with their compound interest servants (business leaders), how can business leaders more effectively meet investor needs by orienting their company strategy, designs, and mechanisms around the needs of employees, customers, and the communities they interact with? It’s widely know that “customer obsession” will get you far. Amazon has proven and coded into organizational DNA an orientation which so radically seeks to meet customer needs over other more banal concerns (short-term profits, for instance) that investors are getting what they really need: long-term, consistent stock price gains. So Amazon has done an impressive thing. They’ve managed to orient toward the needs of two stakeholders simultaneously. Employees happen to be investors as well, so they are getting part of their needs met when they work at Amazon. But there isn’t an Employee Experience Bar-Raiser (see CXBR) or a Community Experience Bar-Raiser, as far as I know (though whoever built this program qualifies as an exceptional EXBR). Here’s the dirty secret economists seem to abhor as an article of faith: humans can optimize for many things simultaneously, even if doing so breaks the complex models of Rational Economic Man (REM) and make us look like fools to the saviors of REM, Behavioral Economists. I’ve come to view life as a continuous journey to improve the meeting of needs, both for oneself and for those around. It seems that the human brain can accomplish so much more than deliver one specific measurable outcome (for example, stock price gains). I expect that there will be companies as operationally effective as Amazon which meet investor, customer, employee, and community needs in ways that create mutually compounding outcomes as surprising as a company whose stock price has gone up and up while focusing on long-term investor value and the needs of customers, and not in that order.