https://www.listennotes.com/e/91310fcaa2174a859a728b0b5044936b

Hi, my name is Alejandro Salazar. I am the managing director of Breakthrough Consulting, Latin American consulting firm and strategy. I'm an author and I am here speaking at EA Interviews.

EA Interviews, episode 537, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week, join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority Effect interview. All right, Expert Authority World. Have you ever felt like you have a great partner, product, a service, something of that nature, and it's just not getting the traction that you want, you know, you want to help people, but you just feel like something is missing? I know I felt that way before. And that's why you're here. And that's why today we're going to go into detail as to why traditional strategic planning is dead and how implementing the revolutionary eight guiding principles of the new emergent strategy approach will breathe new life while transforming your organizational success. I'm going to bring them up right after we thank our sponsor, Alejandro Salazar. Every business needs a book, including yours. And that's why I'm launching my new book to help you, regardless of where you think your current writing abilities are. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that's EA Publishing Method Book. Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Alejandro Salazar. Alejandro, how are you feeling today?

Pretty good, Mario. Very happy to be here in your show and open to questions. I'm very, very interested in talking about it and my theory and how it, how it contrasts with the, with the general practice of a strategic planning, which I think is not the solution, but the problem.

So tell me, why is traditional strategic planning dead and what have you found to be the new way with your emergent approach?

Okay, okay. Plants. I guess everybody knows in its own privacy of its own spirit that plants don't work. There are many, you know, so many philosophers have touched upon that plans fail. You know, when plans fail, people change them for other plans. Or they say the plan was beautiful, but the implementation was bad, or a lot of, you know, circular arguments. And I think the bottom line is that that strategy is not a plan. So when you try to force a strategy into a plan, you kill a strategy and end up with, you know, the entity called a plan, which you, you have to change constantly. I think everybody knows that. When I, when I talk about my ideas, people tell me, I already knew that. That's the beauty. That's why the book has been so successful, because people can relate to it. As to the philosophical grounds to demolish strategic planning, I think they had been around in a disconnected way. I guess two basic ideas had been there before. Both of them, I guess promoted discovery structure by American management philosophers.

You think it just started around years, years ago for whatever reason and just got perpetrated through and no one thought to change it?

Yeah, I mean, I think remember this is some sort of availability syndrome. In the absence of a better theory, people will continue to do plans. People do plans. You know, we're taught to do plans. The whole strategic planning fever came after, you know, basically after the second World War when the army came back to the US and they came back through the GI Bill to schools. It permeated the whole idea that you have to have strategic plans. Throughout the 70s, with the ascent of the Japanese economy, the thing became very paranoid. The Americans thought it was really that the Japanese had a plan. People started making more sophisticated plans. And ever since it has gotten even more complicated. And while the main kind of fashion changes, the bad idea remains. You know, I mean, it was first started quality, then it was re engineering, then it was, you know, integrated systems. Then it became the Internet, mobility, Six Sigma, now, you know, digital digital transformation and now AI. There's always a big idea hovering, but the idea is that people have to do some plans to, to, to face that reality. And, and so it's a widespread phenomenon. I think not only companies and corporations and small businesses do strategic plans. States do them, regions do them, you know, even by law.

So why shouldn't companies do them?

They shouldn't do it because it doesn't work. I mean, you know, what you need, you know, the whole term is a little bit of an oxymoron. Strategic plans. You cannot have a strategy through plans. Strategy is a different phenomenon. I was going to tell you that the basic ideas were around my theory. I just simply kind of connected the two ideas. One idea as to what is a strategy and what is not, and another idea as to how can you come up with one Those two things there were very good insights that were disconnected as to what is the strategy. Mike Porter, the famous Harvard scholar and probably foremost strategy thinker in the last 50 years in 1996, posited that the output of a strategy was a set of hard choices. It wasn't objectives, it wasn't projects, it was choice. Hard choices. The secret of strategy is hard choice. He said strategy is choice. That idea, you know, I was working back then in the company he had founded. So, you know, it came very close to Me and it changed my way of understanding. I think everybody changed his or her perspective with that seminal idea. But then, you know, I thought that the thing was going to be a revolution of itself and it didn't to the day I think is what the number one or two paper in hbr, the idea that the strategy is not objectives, is not, you know, projects, is not. It's simply choices, hard choices. The other idea that was around there had actually been presented or posited before that in 1973. Henry Misber, another professor, actually one out of Canada, American, but maybe he's Canadian. I don't know if it's Canadian or American. And what he said was that you couldn't get to whatever the strategy was through a process of planning. He said planning kills. Whatever the phenomenon is. He left it there too. Both of them left ideas there, just.

Open ended like that.

Yeah, they didn't connect them and so they couldn't possibly compete with the industry, the cookie monster industry that leaves off with strategic plans and you know, everything, it opens with the strategic plans. Remember that strategy. Strategic plan is a little bit of a Trojan horse where you can sell a lot of other things. So the industry was addicted to the idea. I, you know, when I, when I heard Porter presenting his idea of strategy choice, it changed my life and I started, you know, I mean, I couldn't follow my old, my old route and I started trying to get companies to exercise hard choice. And what I learned, you know, I later connected to mins verse ideas. What I learned is that strategy had to be a process of discovering, discovering, learning that would catalyze the famous hard choice. And that you would have to not finish with action, but start with action. So it was totally, totally contrarian to the strategic planning process. You would start by doing, by reflecting upon what you're doing, by understanding the unintended outcomes of what you're doing in the market and through that process entering dissonance and eventually displacing a paradigm that would then give you the courage to exercise the hard choice. So it was a fascinating process.

Why do you think so many people have issues with the hard choice? Because I'm in agreement. Nothing's going to get done if you don't take action. If you don't make a decision, especially if it's a hard one. And it seems like everyone wants to be at B, but they don't. They want to be at C, but they don't want to go through B and decide. And then you just get stuck at point A. And yeah, it's like, well, I wish, you know, it would be nice if it's like do it or don't, like I've joked, like it's a 50, 50 shot. It's either going to work or it's not. But you gain insight, you gain clarity, you learn and you go, hey, this didn't work. And maybe this didn't work and probably this won't work. But at some point you go, I learned, I learned, I learned. There's only one thing that it could be left and then it does work.

I think you're pointing, certainly it has to start by doing. You know, the tragedy of strategic plans is that, you know, they end with implementation and doing, they don't start with the reflection. So, so that's kind of a fundamental thing. But you're right. Why people, why are choices hard? Not to trivialize them, real choices.

Because when, oh you can, you can trivialize them. Some of them are stupid and people still don't want to make them. But I get where you're going.

You're right, you're right. But you know. Yes, but you're right that the choice process is very hard. And it's very hard simply because you are giving up on things that sound attractive. I mean, it's not like you choose life over death is that you choose one thing over some other things that look attractive too. So just to just to not deceive yourself or anybody in the process. Real choices involve payoffs and trade offs, involve giving up on a lot of attractive things. One of which I'm probably the most attractive of them all, is that choice is not about improving. I mean, if you can improve, then why would you choose anything A over B? So it was really the, you know, and that's one of the sad things of strategic plans is they really are, they really aren't a strategy. They're just pure improvement and improvement. This is going to be very hard. What I'm going to say improvement kills choice. That, that's exactly why, you know, the, the Japanese economy. Porter's seminal idea came after he went to Japan and discovered, hired by the Japanese government, that back in the 90s, the Japanese were very good at everything, but they were very converging, very similar companies. They wouldn't make money. So the choice is hard because yes, you are living away, giving up on a lot of attractive, trendy, sexy things to focus on your thing where you have some sort of advantage. An advantage is typically coherence. You choose a set of things over others. You choose them in a coherent way. And at the end, interestingly, what happens when you follow that path is that you create a unique company. Competing is building a unique company in the marketplace. So it's actually the worst thing is actually to converge and to be similar to and to improve after the others example. So convergence is the disease and the antidote is hard to.

And you actually have a profitable company because when you're saying all the companies, they're similar, they're not profitable, those sound more like nonprofits to me.

Yeah, exactly.

That's not anyone's goal if it's a for profit, capitalistic company. I love nonprofits, but you have to be clear with the goals.

You're right. But it happens every.