Car Manufacturers The first thing you must know as a consumer is that already many car manufacturers have some level of autonomous technology built into their cars. Many of existing manufacturers are letting Google (ehhh... I meant Alphabet) battle the legislators and break down the customer adoption barriers, while they happily use autonomous car features to make their cars smarter. BMW's 2016 Series 7 features driver-less parking and speed limit obedience technology. Mercedes-Benz and even Tesla Model S autopilot technology are also good examples. While you are at it add Baidu and BMW's joint efforts to bring driver-less cars to the mass populations in couple of years and GM's joint venture with Chinese automaker SAIC to build a hybrid autonomous volt by 2030 (Chevrolet-FNR). The slide below is a bit outdated but has a good summary of who is doing what among the manufacturers. Commercial Fleet (e.g., transportation and dump trucks) This usage of autonomous technology makes so much economical sense but not so many people talk about it (I guess because Goolge and Tesla are the ones people get all hot about and transportation and dump trucks are not so sexy). In any case, in the U.S. alone +60% of goods are transported through truck fleets and up to 40% of the cost is due to fuel. One autonomous feature that allows for truck drafting (developed by Peloton Technologies) would save up to 10% of fuel cost. Imagine a snake of trucks cruising close to one another (at the distance not safe enough for a human operator but perfectly fine for an instant reaction of a computer). The first truck operated by a human and the rest all follow the alpha truck in front. So the economic model behind it pays for the R&D and upfront expenses. I won't even talk about the 30% cost of drivers that could be fully eliminated at the end state of a fully driver-less trucks. Daimler (Mercedes-Benz) has already piloted a driver-less truck. While Caterpillar and Komatsu are good examples of already in-use autonomous cars in mining and dump trucks. Technology players: Now that we know who are the most immediate users of autonomous car technology, it is time to focus on the technology they are using. In its simplest form the technology for a driver-less luxury BMW sedan or a rugged mining Caterpillar mammoth has 7 components (see the image below). The one thing you should know that will help define which companies are worth your investment is that these seven types of tech providers are not all the same and broadly grouped into two types:
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Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, open space offices, blogs, newsletters, email chains, reply all emails, outlook calendars full of meetings, double and triple booked hours of the day, back to back recurring conference calls starting form 6:00 am to talk to your team in Europe and finishing at 8:00 pm with calls with your Asia-Pacific counterparts. It never stops! Someone or something would want to claim one more minute out of your day, while adding lines to your never-ending to-do list. Honestly, now that I think about them, 99% are non essential to my success at work and happiness at life! This was my first reaction when I finished listening to Essentialism by Greg Mckeown. My 2nd thought after finishing this book was that I need to share it with 10 people I know who are truly non-essentialists. It has the potential to change their lives and careers alike. But, I thought I don't want to call one of my friends and say: "hey, I think you are a non-essentialist, sooooo please read this book". Even if I don't say it, after going through the first chapter they would know why I gave them the book... Instead, before I get to my thoughts about the "Essentialist Strategy", if you are interested to learn about the path of an essentialist, let me know in the comment section and I will personally buy you a copy. This is my altruistic side that gets excited about new thoughts and ideas and loves to share it with the world. I hope at least 10 of you take me up on this offer! Now, let's go back to my less altruistic side and more career-focused thoughts and reactions to the book. Greg defines essentialism as "the disciplined pursuit of less". Similarly, by design, strategic planning is the practice of identifying what is absolutely essential for the company and then keeping the company focused on that direction. The goal of a strategic plan is to maintain company's resources focused on the company's priority. After reading Greg's book, I believe Essentialism is the only practice a company must adhere to in order to execute on its strategy and maintain its focus. I'd like to call it an "Essentialist Strategy".
In the book, Greg talks about different techniques to pursue the path of an essentialist. Among all, the one that is mostly relevant to an essentialist strategy, is the process of identifying what not to do. What the company should not do is usually unidentified and is the cause of too many miserable failures in the realm of strategic planning. In most companies who fail to execute on their strategy, three scenarios are shaped after the planning phase is over. All of which could be prevented if one follows an essentialist manner to the strategic planning process and add the "what not to do's" section to the plan. Here are the three scenarios:
P.S. Thank you to my good colleague and friend who recommended the Essentialist to me! I confess a lot of times I am a non essentialist and the book has triggered wonderful thoughts including this blog post! Thank you! Will your strategy fail?11/13/2015 I worked in strategy and planning function most of my professional career. Even when I did not have the term "strategy" in my title, I always ended up doing strategic planning in one shape or another. Sadly, over the years, I've seen many well-developed strategies that were either shelved, or even if executed, did not create the results that they were meant to. Almost all of these strategies were developed by super smart, business savvy teams. In many cases, they were the masterpieces created by the consulting teams from very well paid, well-reputed strategy consulting firms we all came to know and love. Nevertheless, they failed to deliver. As the result, I've developed a professional curiosity to come up and/or collect a set of sniff tests to predict the fate of a strategic project early on in the process. The project could be a corporate long-term plan or a sales Go-to-Market strategy, but my sniff tests work well every time. I haven't come up with them all, some I've heard from others and some I've learned by experience, but they all proven to work every time I tested them. So without further ado, here are the four Strategy Failure Sniff Tests: 1. How old is the problem?
Strategy development is essentially a problem-solving exercise. Even if you don't start with a problem, you always end up with a set of options, and the problem becomes which option is the best course of action to follow. If the underlying problem you are solving is couple of years old, meaning that you have already tried to solve that problem at least one more time, chances are your strategy will fail in the execution phase. If you have already tired to answer the same strategic question or solve the same problem, then something must have gone wrong in the execution phase. If you are not aware of that, or if you cannot articulate what has changed this time around, then chances are your strategy fails in the execution yet again another time. 2. Is the opposite of your strategy stupid? This one is my favorite, but sadly I haven't came up with it. I've learned this from Roger L. Martin's article on HBR. The idea is so simple! Take a moment and imagine the opposite of your strategy. Is it stupid? Then you will fail! Ok, confused? let's take an example: Assuming your strategy is to make your company the best workplace on earth. Then the opposite of your strategy is to create the worst workplace on earth. Assuming that you are not running a social experiment about how bad workplaces impact people's productivity, then your strategy will fail because it actually does not qualify as a real strategy. The direction you are taking is the only logical direction that you can take and that means you don't know how to get there yet. 3. Are the doers involved? This one is a real hard one to get your head around if you are working in a big corporation and your title reads something like "VP of Strategic Development" or "Director, Sales Go-to-Market Strategy". Basically you work in a function that its sole purpose is to develop strategies. In that case, chances are the people who will do the work based on the strategy are not a part of the strategy team. You and your fellow strategists have access to all the decision makers of the company and your masterpieces will be presented to them in a nicely packaged power point presentations that are only worthy of the attention of the CxO suite. If you did not start the project with the doers and haven't asked them what worked and did not work last time around you gave them a strategic direction, then you will fail. I actually recommend you join a strategy consulting company because at least you will get paid a lot more for the same doomed to fail work you are doing. 4. Does it include "No-No" section? Developing a strategy means that you will say "yes" to one specific direction and "no" to whole a lot of other directions. Every strategy document should include a section that clearly articulates what I'd like to call the "No-No" section. It doesn't need to be as dramatic as it sounds and it doesn't need a slide with the term "No-No" in the title. But rather needs a section that explains as the results of the informed choices we are making here, options "b" and "c" are not accessible to us anymore. This could be achieved easily through set of indicators to monitor, or a decision making checklist that will help saying "no" to many things and just accepting few actions that are aligned with the strategy. If you don't have it, your strategy will fail in the execution phase. There you have it! My all time four favorite strategy failure sniff tests. I might occasionally check-in back here and add more to the list. If you have other sniff tests you use to predict the probability of failing a nicely done strategy project, let me know and we can add it to the list for the sake of all of us who care about doing as much as we love planning. Harvard Innovation Lab published a video about how our working desks have evolved since 1980s. Somehow we took out the clutter on our desks and made it much more portable. The idea made me think that our resumes also need an evolution! If our work spaces needed to be evolved because work has become a lot more virtual and a lot less location-specific, then hasn't our resume that represent our work has evolved too!
I'm neither an Ivey MBA nor an alumni of the tech/consulting/investment banking/venture capital titans. So, now what? I need a resume that shows my uniqueness. I need to evolve my resume from an algorithm-pleasing document to a story-telling medium. Because what makes me unique is not my MBA or my strategy work history but rather the story of my personal and professional life. I'm a dreamer, a doer, an organizer, an analyst, a planner, a problem-solver, and a strategist and I have tested those skills in multiple countries, companies and context. My story is something like the below one-pager (maybe at some point I add a one-min narration to actually tell the story???) So, next time I'm sending a resume to someone, it will tell my unique story, it will not have the bullets and dots of my job description, but rather shows how I evolved as a person and as a professional. Just like what Harvard Innovation Lab said about our desks, my resume has evolved from a generic document to a unique story!
Recently, I read about the main reasons that why a well-developed business strategy fails (it might have been this HBR article but not sure) and among many of the reasons, there was one that really resonated with me and have kept my mind busy for long. It goes something like this: "Show me a firm that its strategy is formulated by non doers and I'll show you a firm that fails at achieving many of its goals." I'm not doing a justice to how it was actually articulated in that article, but nevertheless the message was something similar to what I wrote. The point is, if operational aspects of a strategy are not considered as the strategy is being formulated, then the possibility of success is very small, if none. Why is that? And more immortally, if you are working in the strategy function of a company, or you are one of those very well-paid strategy consultants - that many of MBA graduates would aspire to be - then what can you learn from the above mentioned statement? Over the years in my strategy and operations career, I have witnessed the two sides of the coin; failure and success of a strategy in real-life:
Failure: Those $1M to $5M projects with The Big 3 consulting firms, and the little army of junior consultants, engagement managers, and the partners that never leave your company and lend themselves well to the juicy gossip of the hallways are unfortunately too familiar projects to many of us. We also have heard about the downward spiral image of the "MBA-style" planning that many of the most successful companies of our time are avoiding at all costs (if you don't believe me read How Google Works, or better yet, go to the slide 28 of Eric Schmidt's PPT on slideshare). Why is that? Because those strategies are developed by consultants, behind the doors of the C-Suit floor, usually considered as not-to-mention projects with secret, albeit cute code names. More importantly, the doers and operation managers never see the light of that fat, glossy walk-through deck until it falls on their desk for execution. Meanwhile, all the doers have already moved on to another set of problems they need to deal with and don't even care about the well-thought solution that has been articulated in the strategy document. Even if they care, they are so buried under all the operational issues that they have to deal with (and believe me, when you work at operations there is always a fire drill issue and that's just how it is) that they don't have the time and patience to read through and understand the genius of the proposed strategy. So it is not surprising that many people cringe when they hear the world "consultant" and would try to get as far, mentally and even physically, as possible away from the strategy team and the project. When it comes to the execution, they scramble and do what is too familiar to them already and can be executed in the shortest time frame and that's simply how the strategy fails. Success: How many times we've heard of non business people who actually made it big and drove a new venture to unimaginable success? Why would they succeed although in reality they are nor formally educated in the delicate matter of business strategy, nor that they have had the money to afford hiring consultants for $1M to $5M! They succeed because the strategists are also the doers. Simple as that! They get crystal clear about what they want to do, and they just do it. No c-suit floor and no big, glossy walk-through decks and that means even if they don't have a good strategy, they can iterate, refine and act. When they finally get to the most suited strategic direction, by design, they can focus on small operational issues, work around them, and bulldoze through until they arrive at the destination. So, the lesson of the story is not that everybody must form a small company to succeed (which is actually the storm-force behind the start-up wave in recent years). Nor is that all big companies need to chop down their team into small start-up like entities so that they can protect the "so-called" start-up culture and doer attitude. It also doesn't mean that the big consulting firms and all others in the noble profession of strategy consulting need to pack their bags and go home. The lesson is that strategy must be operationally informed. And that means strategy development process needs to be refined to allow for operations to inform the process. The "how" is of course the million dollar question that is rarely answered and worth the time of us who are in the strategy profession. How one does that, is the story of another day-dreaming of mine. Stay tuned and I will write about it next time. Until then, look for operationally informed strategists, They are a rare gem of a bread of strategists and if you found one, hold on to him/her and never let go! You will thank me later! Single source of truth... I used to love this term. As a problem-solver, you love the idea of having access to a single source of truth. That all encompassing, easy to access, reliable report or dashboard that you could look at and that will be the only fact you would ever need to solve the problem at hand. The premise is elusive but in reality I've never seen a team, a function or an organization to be that magical source of truth!
So recently I actually believe in the single story of truth... regardless of where you get your data, you need to be able to tell a story that helps you shape the truth. I'm not naive to believe that there is only one story of truth but you need many sources of truth to be able to shape the truth you are aspiring to. Don't aspire to become or have access to a single source of truth! use all sources of data, to shape your single story of truth! This might actually end the fight between IT, Data Sciences team, Analytics team, Strategy team(s) and many other teams who aspire to be the single source of truth! Just give us the data you have access to in a reliable format and we will be grateful to you forever! |
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