Mithun Sridharan clip Long-Term Strategy Conference

As folks are listening, they might say, hold on, my organization doesn't have a strategy. What is he talking about? So you said, interesting, that every organization that's of a decent size— I know you could have a person who's, you know, like a mad scientist live in a laboratory who starts a company, he might have no strategy. But any company that's an ongoing concern, you said, has some kind of strategy. And I'm imagining you're saying, even if it's not written down, there's a strategy there somewhere. How do you respond to someone who says, my company doesn't have a strategy? What would you say to them? And they might be any, at any level, they could be an executive, they could be, they could be a manager, but they might say, no, mine doesn't. How would you, how would you explain what you, what you said to them so that they could have a clue as to what, what it really means?

Very good point. So depending on who you talk to in the organization, they might not be cognizant or aware of the existence of a strategy. As I mentioned before, any organization of, um, definitive size or definitive revenue figure or definitive market cap, they definitely do have a strategy. So when somebody says that they don't have a strategy, the problem might be that they are not aware of the existence of a strategy, or the strategy documents have not been formalized and federated to their employees, which is another problem. It's a problem of a different kind. It's more about strategy communication and involving the necessary stakeholders in the strategy formulation, executing, execution, and implementation processes. So that would be a different problem to tackle for the organization because the employees do need to understand the strategy to first validate whether the work contributes to the overall value of the organization is trying to achieve as articulated by its mission statement, value statement, leadership documents, and all that. So that would be the first part. The second part is when you are looking at the frontline employees, having a good understanding of the strategy would definitely enable them and empower them to deliver more value to their customers, which has its effects in terms of brand equity, brand recall, customer satisfaction, repeat purchases, customer lifetime value, which lead to the lagging indicator, which is the financial performance of the organization. So in my view, strategy is not just a remit of senior executives and boards, but rather strategy needs to be federated down to the organization, to the front-level employees, to the— to you. I would go as far as to communicating strategy documents to your partners, suppliers, and the entire ecosystem that you work with, so everybody has a shared understanding of what you stand for, What value you bring to the ecosystem, what is your positioning, and how you intend to execute upon the strategy. And giving this clarity would not only enable a tighter integration of your entire ecosystem that includes your shareholders and other stakeholders, but also help you build a support network where you have a place on this ecosystem, support your activities, where— as well as you supporting the ecosystem. So