Corporate strategy observations from the bottom of Getting Things Done.

I work as a software product manager in a large corporation.

It’s historically grown with a range of value streams which are conceptionally as classic as any “can you give me some corn for my furs”-dealings to state of the art business model adaptions for modern societies and its enlaced technologies.

I think that at a certain scale every company turns from a single-purpose, target-aligned spearhead to a multitude of possibly unaligned, but very entangled spearheads. One starts with a mission, clarity, and over the course of time it is necessary to diversify, adapt and to adjust. More people to cover more ground, to spend more time on doing things right. More expertise to excel in tasks which need to be done. More organization and management and structure to make sure all these people can work together. More ideas and bets to reach for opportunities and counter threats to help that grown, scaled company survive.

With all those mostly competent, paid people, with all their experience and knowledge, all the money at disposal - a company like that cannot afford to not address all of the possibilities and threats. It would be a waste, no, a risk not to tackle them, right? Right?

A late bloomer epiphany as ignorance reveal.

I was 46 years old when I understood that this is called corporate portfolio management. The idea is rather simple and I suppose it’s something one does innately and more or less professionally as soon as one starts to think about business strategy - the concept itself can be applied to wide range of strategies, e.g. military tactics, financial investments, etc.

This basic idea is to find the ideal spot between risks and opportunities, in diversifying your strategic options. A spot which, after assessing all those risks and opportunities, after pursuing the most promising and avoiding the most threatening ones, after failing at some and succeeding with others, the overall result will let you walk away as a winner.

I said the concept is easy. But implementing this in reality is not. It gets indefinitely harder depending who’s also playing the game. It’s also very demanding the more often the rules and environment variables change. And then, if you are depending on humans, many humans, it’s like that guy on the horse trying to fight windmills. Well, as long as you try to respect them. The humans, not the windmills.

There’s science for it all. There are ways to study this. There are consultants to help with it. There are methods and tools and smart people who know what they are doing. There are leadership coachings and conferences.

Or so I imagine.

This could be your drop-off point. If you are like me, wondering about the at times unfathomable decisions from the corporate gods above and you’d like to dig deeper, then tag along. A corporate god or their ambassadors may as well get something out of it, a direct line to a subject who craves for a bit more context for corporate strategy making. For anyone else, don’t read any further - you most likely only enjoy the ¹footnotes.

Effectiveness and trust

I reside at the farthest end of corporate strategy, implementing its policies. And while I pride myself to believe that I actually do understand why we are pursuing things - I still struggle with the intricacies of it.

The definition of a portfolio management strategy implies that a company walks into possibly different directions at the same time. Remember the entangled, multitude of spearheads? It’s by design. And traditionally it’s a ²mess. The principle to deal with this is by applying a process to it, which enables you to decide when to take which branch in the moment you and your mates come to the next crossroad and cannot figure out which is the right direction all by yourself.

In it’s core it’s a dissociative experience. You got your goals and you are merrily chopping away chips of that huge stump of a tree to get there and suddenly someone decides that stumps should ³rot their way out of existence.

Or it’s like orchestrating a complex, glorious symphony with a full set of talented musicians, training for years and then someone pulls the plug or you’ll have this concert eventually some time in the future even though you already passed the dress rehearsal.

It could be even people smiling at you, shaking your hands, clapping your back for all the efforts you bring in, how valuable your work is, but effectively you need someone else to get off and they are ⁴cockblocking you because their goals are more important/critical for… forever.

Maybe you just delivered the best numbers and works ever, won prizes and hearts and then you’ll get laid off because your value stream isn’t valuable enough in comparison and for the profit margins of shareholders.

I never went to the army. Still, I wonder if losing internally at the portfolio gamble is like a very cushy, comfortable version of being the unit of poor sods who are simple infantry cannon fodder distracting the enemy until the real cavalry rides in.

As said: It’s intentional. Don’t take it personally.

But aside from the fact that you always should be getting paid reasonably for induced dissociation, the real currency of the system is trust. Trust, that if you throw yourself into the trenches, it will serve the greater good - that your earthly and spiritual leaders would ⁵never wantonly negligent harm you and this is the last possible measure.

But what happens if cognitive dissonance kicks in? You know you should trust your leaders to do the right thing but your experience feels exactly opposite? Are there possibilities to recognize when trust will erode?

Sign #1: Entangled Spearheads aka no sh*t is getting done

From my ⁶experience I pretty confidently assume, that the more entangled stuff you do at the same time, the more of it will fail. Or will take forever which is essentially the same.

It’s like putting twenty-three dishes in front of five people. Then you tell everybody to eat from every dish. But you only hand out three plates and one piece of cutlery. Everybody is supposed to eat in parallel and be finished in 12 minutes so everyone can go and ⁷brush their teeth in time before going to bed.

The point is that when not only a small percentage of your org feels like this (by design), but the overwhelming part of your company is affected, trust in strategy degrades.

Any given problem lingers for years and if someone decides to tackle it, it takes a third of the company to solve it. People across domains and divisions sit together in long meetings, struggle to gain common ground which is already a compromise nobody really wants - and then a new player enters and the whole conundrum goes full circle. But it turns out you are not the only one having great plans - you first despair in getting no attention, then you get too much of it and after a few months the company shifts strategy because it takes too long to get results because everything’s entangled.

It’s a collective experience of a standstill while people crave ⁸progress.

Sign #2: Process Gaming aka cheat to win

The simplest way to sort #1 out would to employ a process which regularly checks if the priorities are clear. Just follow the process and you’ll be fine.

Yeah, it might work. But the human condition of not being very good at experiencing ineffectiveness over extended periods of time and the reliable individual ambition paired with either negligence or ignorance for holistic benefit can crash the most and best processes you might come up with.

It’s the equivalent of kids being suddenly allergic to eat a specific dish. Or they are not hungry anymore after two spoons of green vegetables or have aching teeth or any other medical condition from now to next. Food is magically disappearing under the table while your dog is getting fatter by the day and your chocolate stash grows thinner and this time, and it’s not you eating it.

The problem about actors gaming the system is, that it’s undermining trust in the institutions. First as covert action, at a later point openly, gaining traction as a heroic act to defy the rule of the “oppressor”.

Sign #3: The Process Code of Law aka Cat-and-Mouse are in the house

Company leaders ain’t stupid. They see the system is cheated on (so did your teachers, so do parents). So the simplest way to deal with #2 is normally tackled by enforcing more complex rules, establish a wide range of diverse standardized definitions, calling in commitees of your best workers to keep them from doing real work. Wasting Investing time squeezing deep, non-deterministic insights into shallow, digestable form fields.

You know how which dishes are supposed to be eaten first. You also make it really hard to discard the plates below the table. But your chocolate stash still melts. All the while people are pondering if the dish is michelin or fast food quality. Or if they got to weigh the dish in gram or pounds and which weight is adequate enough to even appear on the menu? If it’s not on the menu, they can snack on the side because it’s a basic food item, is it not? Diet plans creep up and the kids are screaming and bickering and not eating at all.⁹

Hello bureaucracy. This is the point where the querulent smart ones just work out how to game new rules and the others submerge in they-told-me-so-moisturizer-body-lotion.

People are sucking up to the process over and over again, adapt to its changes while they are still getting paid for being human geese providing foie gras for the company. Not a surprise: It slows you down more. A very wise person once told me, that being industrious is not necessarily the same as delivering value.

Sign #4: The Hierarchy Alienation aka my boss does not understand me

The last nail in the coffin of the antropomorphed version of trust is when you reached a state where you as an employee feel like your superiors decide on strategy only by unreliable headlines, powerpoints, aggregated form fields and with whom they had the last lunch or is better at mastering Schopenhauer’s Eristic Dialectic (Si apre in una nuova finestra).

You want them to understand the complexity of the manifold things you are supposed to accomplish and which you can’t. They want you to understand why all of them are necessary and why it’s okay that your job sucks (It’s by design, but sometimes it’s still nice to know why). Resulting in you not getting the in-depth decisions that need to be made and your boss not getting the results they decided on.

But you have no time to clarify and to align. It gets worse with hierarchy levels, when the need for a qualified decision is bubbling up from the bottom, but the in-depth knowledege for that decision is messed with by messengers and abstractions. Then it clashes with all the goals and incentives from the top and you end up with less trust in your overall strategy. Less trust means eroding safe space. Eroding safe space means worse “real” insights. Worse insights means degraded valuable feedback. Bad feedback means your strategy will be a frail gamble and the self-fulfilling prophecy goes full circle.

It’s old news, DUMMY!

I want to believe that corporate strategists know all this. I want to believe that my uninformed viewpoints cannot even remotely grasp the elaborate and intricate musings specialists go through who actually work on this every day for ten+ years straight. I want them to respect our human incapacities in their models of strategy making and ideally not only as a risk but a potential.

Maybe I have to change my perspective, that humans will be humans after all, with all their shortcomings. That there is no framework, no structure to fix this adequately. That there are moments when I should savor something running smoothly just to be prepared and charged when things get bumpy again.

1. I wonder how much Pratchett wrote until he got so focused and concise that he decided dropping footnotes alltogether would help his storytelling. ↩

2. There is that one guy who’s convinced the mess is beautiful. I respect the man deeply, but I am not so sure about the masochistic aspects, yet. ↩

3. Seldomly works for legacy software monoliths. Those are quite pesky and rather grow into entirely new abominations. ↩

4. We are all decent people and very professional. The metaphor is still intentional. ↩

5. Some are asshats, some are indeed empathetic. A certain form of cruelty is demanded to do the job. ↩

6. Ask my devs. Many effects observed in the small, do not magically disappear when adding more people. Who would have guessed? ↩

7. I have an excuse for writing stuff like this. I have three kids. ↩

8. “Avoiding traffic jams” is an example for this. You may not save any time or any fuel or charge by switching to an alternate route. You may even get lost or stuck - but then it was your choice and moving still feels better. ↩

9. Honestly, no references to my life in there, I promise. ↩