Strategy From a Different Perspective

Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything – Bryce G. Hoffman (Crown Business)

Your seen firsthand. You probably at one point participated in it. Someone higher up the management food chain comes to the table during a strategic planning session and present what they think is a brilliant idea and they can site statistics and dialogue that soundly supports their take on things; it sounds like a winner. Then all of the yes men line up and sound off in support of the proposal, no one steps into the breach to challenge any assumptions.

Then six months or a year into the execution cycle the wheels fall off and the strategy either heads back to the drawing board for a retooling or gets scraped completely. More often than not no one gets held accountable and we all move on to the next brilliant strategy that we can all get behind. If you’re like me, this kind of thing will drive you crazy. As I gained experience and confidence, more and more often I would offer push back to challenge assumptions and often tweak or improve on strategies. Often, that’s not an easy thing to do.

So what’s a better why to be the contrarian in the room? While it’s being billed as a revolutionary new way of approaching strategic thinking, red teaming as it’s been dubbed, is a strategic approach that has been around for awhile, but more recently gained the title and has evolved and been honed into a business planning strategy.

Bestselling author Bryce G. Hoffman (American Icon) has penned book to 

summarize not only the process but of his stint working side by side with the 

military to learn firsthand how the process all works. In Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything Hoffman gives you the historical reference for red teaming and walk through how the process moved from military application to the board room and how major corporations and even small business can used the process to improve results.

The process really boils down to elevating critical thinking and expanding the strategic planning process. While so often we tend to focus on our own business during the planning process, Red Teaming really forces us to change our focus; to help identify holes in the plan, challenges from the competition and I think most importantly identify opportunities in the competitive environment.

For the strategist that is familiar with the red teaming process, Hoffman’s book may seem a bit basic, but it never hurts to have access to a primer on any subject. For those looking to delve deeper into the process I would recommend searching out the military’s Applied Critical Thinking Handbook, which was formerly called the Red Teaming Handbook. You can easily Google it and find it in PDF form or Amazon has the Kindle Version for less than ten bucks.

Leaders Are Built…Not Born

Leaders Made Here: Building a Leadership Culture – Mark Miller (Berrett-Koehler Publishers)

“___Fill in the blank____ is the only sustainable competitive advantage”

After stringing together millions of them over the course of my career, I have to admit, that I am a sucker for words. So when I read a great line that literally jumps off the page at me, I tend to get fired up.

When I read the opening part of the line above in leadership guru and bestselling author, Mark Miller’s new book, Leaders Made Here: Building a Leadership Culture, I perked up. What was the answer? A quick Google search will yields things like innovation, a business’s ability to learn faster than their competition (?) but it is Miller who truly hits on the answer. “Leadership is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

While learning at a greater velocity is a competitive advantage and innovation certainly is as well, it is the sustainability piece that make it more difficult. But when it comes to leadership and building a culture of leadership, that all important bench strength, is something that is doable if a business makes the commitment to make it happen.

Miller, a Chick-fil-A executive and co-author of a number of bestselling leadership books with Ken Blanchard, uses the time-tested business parable to impart his story and the leadership culture lessons in Leaders Made Here. While I am not a huge fan of this style of book, I think Miller does a great job of pretty clearly delineating actionable steps that businesses can take to create and grow a leadership culture.

He provides the building blocks that you can put in place to form the cornerstone of your leadership culture; from agreeing on basics of a definition of leader and some of the potential roadblocks that can create within a business if everybody is not on the same page. This would make for a great exercise to gauge what your leadership team is thinking and how to build on a unified platform. It cuts down on wasted time, inconsistent messages and agendas and the lack of focus.