Strategic Thinking
Lesson 1
There are many ways to look at strategy in business. In this training, we'll look at a variety of highly influential perspectives. Rather than defining what strategic thinking is or how to do it, we will explore these different perspectives to use as springboards for our own thinking when we are working on Planning, Focus, and Decision-making as outlined in other lessons.
A video that we're going to start with is Elon Musk's vision for building a future worth getting excited about. Here are Circle Social, we view business as a positive force for sustainable change. By creating value, we better people's lives. This happens in our ability to connect people to quality care, our ability to provide for our team members, and our ability to support organizations we care about.
Circle Social is structured as a Benefits Corporation, meaning it is legally required to strive for and report to the state on the net positive benefits it creates for individuals and society at large. However, unlike a non-profit that doesn't pay taxes, we do. This is important because taxes are what pays for all of our social services and infrastructure such as roads, Medicaid, housing assistance, schools, libraries, etc. Non-profits do not pay taxes, so often support none of these things. For the most part, the majority of non-profits only exist because of grants provided by taxes or through the philanthropic donations of individuals and for-profit businesses.
Fundamentally, capital growth and accumulation enables workforce specialization and the capability to create every bigger projects. Watch the video below of the construction of the Charles Bridge in Prague.
Simply amazing, right? Think about what it took to create that.
1) A demand for large bridges that allowed for commitment of time, capital, and effort to ever-improving bridge building techniques and technology.
2) A society that had enough wealth to allow for universities, decades-long apprenticeships, and highly specialized labor.
3) Capital accumulated in order to pay for all the materials and labor for such a massive project.
We could apply the same preconditions for NASA and getting man to the moon.
Another interesting example is the Rockefeller Foundation. Through concentrated capital and focus, the Rockefeller Foundation moved medicine from cure-alls, patent medicine, and blood leeching, to the evidence-based practices we are familiar with today. For a brief overview of that history, see here.
As a core part of our strategic thinking at Circle Social, we always want to be considering what is the positive impact we're having and how can we grow and scale that impact. Even though we like to say that we often have an outsized impact compared to our size, to do big things, we need to be big ourselves. A teacher in a classroom can help only the 20 children in their class. The prinicipal of the school has the ability to impact hundreds. The superintendent, thousands. Through growth, comes scalable impact.
Let's see how Elon approaches his vision and work.
Blue Ocean Strategy is looking for opportunity that others haven't envisioned yet. Rather than iterating on an existing model, this is all about creating opportunities and markets. This is not something we've done at Circle Social, but it is a valuable approach to keep in mind.
Related to a blue ocean strategy is much of what Peter Thiel discusses in his book, "Zero to One." He provides a lot of excellent, concrete examples in the way to envision competition, startups, and strategy.
Finally, let's take a look at Clayton Christensen and "the Innovator's Dilemma." His book and plethora of videos on the topic are all enlightening, but we'll only take a look at one of them for this training.
Questions to consider as you ponder all of the content above:
1) What enables growth?
2) Why is vision important to the success of an organization and its mission?
3) How do you decide when to allocate capital versus when to save it?
4) When does it make sense to incrementally iterate goals versus starting from scratch and making something new?
5) What's the relationship between profit and achievement of mission?
6) How do you plan for success? What obstacles or pitfalls should you watch out for?
