Seeking Success in Additive: You Should Probably Have a Strategy

A lot of companies have a plan, an idea, some semi-coherent tale, or maybe even an outline of a business. They have a deck of PowerPoints they once sold to investors. Perhaps they even have a business plan that was not a paint-by-numbers affair. A lot of this stuff is kind of a MadLibs, based on whichever management book is popular at the time, and some how-to guides. Often, people have just copied an outline of someone else’s strategy, or applied a strategy that has been successful elsewhere, to additive. But, not a lot of businesses actually have their own strategy.

We can discuss at length what a strategy is or what it is not, but in my opinion, a strategy is a unique to you, accepted, lived, story, plan, and skill set based on reality that will enable your organization to build its capabilities, skills, and resources, and find its way towards likelier success. What I mean by that is that for this strategy to work, leaders and everyone in the organization must know and accept it. They have to, through maxim or understanding, live this plan day in and day out. It has to be explainable, like a story that can lead to the adoption of skills that follow from this lived plan. It has to be grounded in an actual understanding of who you are, your culture, your capabilities, the world, your market, and how the world will develop. These things will be good for you and make for an aligned, motivated workforce working towards a goal. But, you have to keep learning, getting better, building capacity, building some kind of means of production that is improved. You can’t just set off randomly, you must set off knowing where you’re going, together. And along the way, you should get better. That altogether will allow you to become better at winning at whatever game you’ve decided that you are in, towards any prize that you aspire to achieve.

This is crucial, because the goals, the way you see victory, and how you define the path you walk will affect everything. And the part about “unique to you” is also key because a lot of strategies are generic. If you see what culturally, intellectually, in terms of capabilities or abilities or skills you have that could make you win. With honesty, you could see that perhaps precision is not inherent to your people, but kindness is. Are you then going to make the kindness become more precise? Or will you change paths to see how kindness could lead to advantage?

Strategy is the map and route to success, but what many people forget is that it has to be based on what you can do better. Also, a map only works if it is an accurate reflection of the world, and you can know where you are on that map. You can only navigate with a map by checking your progress on it or via landmarks. Famously, tactics is the how and strategy is the why. But, you should take into account which tactics could work and if you are the right people to deploy this strategy, or the right people to execute better than others on these specific tactics. If you’re a general and you have no parachutes, you would not attempt a paradrop. If you know that your troops are more lightly armed, you wouldn’t send them up against tanks. You also wouldn’t expect them to magically acquire the ability to combat tanks. If you have better marksmen, you would maybe try to engage from further out. If your troops knew the area well, than this tactic may work even better. But, you wouldn’t just say that better marksmanship is the key thing, declare that better marksmanship is what we’re working towards, but then forget to build that capability.

This is one of the biggest mistakes companies make. We say that we’re going to win in being efficient, but we don’t get better at being efficient, don’t propagate efficiency culturally, and don’t study what needs to be done to improve efficiency. And often, companies will think: we have better marksmen and know the terrain better, without building the marksmens’ capability or verifying that we do know that terrain better, or even how to define this.

A lot of Excel and ideas then get poured into a plan. The plan is then told to everyone. Things are bought and titles are renamed. But, the actual capability is not significantly increased coherently. We’re executing on Plan 2000, but we have not defined what “know the terrain better” is, how to get there, or how to benchmark this capability and make it an engrained capability. Instead we focus on KPI´s, reporting, data, meetings and progress updates. It creates a kind of a “theater of adoption.” We’re doing stuff and everyone is so busy, but we’re actually not getting better at what we need to be getting better in. We have lots of targets and KPIs and the marksmanship on the range may be improving. But, no one thought of marksmanship in the field, for example. No one considered getting everyone better rifles, or were increasing the scores on the range without actually working on marksmanship. But, the biggest issue is not improving our “knew the area better” capability. Later on we changed where we will fight but continue to assume that we know the area better. That kind of strategic carryover is also very prevalent.

Some 3D printing businesses are failing now because of bad luck. They need money where there isn’t any to be had. Others have just not executed well enough on their promises. Others have performance, but not enough is expected to follow to get people to part with more money. But, there are also a lot of businesses in additive that never had a strategy. Do you?