Cranfield School of Management
Interview: Tony Grundy
Be Your Own Strategy Consultant
SM
Hello, my name is Steve Macaulay from the Learning Services Team
at Cranfield School of Management. I am interviewing Tony Grundy
who is the co-author of Be Your Own Strategy Consultant. Tony, I
would first like to ask what led to you write the book?
TG
Well, I had written a number of books already and my thought process
was evolving because I was working with the tools in practice a lot and
realising there were still things to add and I was up at Standard Life
one day and the director there said, Tony I have just been seen
by a certain consultancy firm who charged me a fortune for the strategy,
if only someone could help me to avoid them and I thought that is really
what people want to be able to do – not to get rid of them entirely, but
be able to do a lot of that sort of thing themselves. So I set out to write
a very practical illustrated account of how you could do that and
demystify the process.
SM
Now I remember reading a quote towards the end of the book that
said something like you don’t have to be a superman or a
superwoman to put these things into practice. It always seems a bit
of a difficult task that you ought to give to a consultant.
TG
Well, I’m not sure about that because a lot of practising managers
whilst they get too involved in the day to day, we call it the sort of
rabbit hole thinking, in quite a short time period – even a two or three
day workshops – they are in a different space and provided they
practice it they can actually be just as good strategic thinkers as an ex
McKinsey strategic planner or someone with an MBA from a very top
business school.
SM
So, for an average manager then, how would you put strategy into
practice?
TG
Well, I mean first of all any problem can be diagnosed by using
techniques like fishbone analysis for getting to the root causes and
then everyone can use various techniques for visually to create
options and to create them and we have the option grid and the
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octopus and tractions and difficulty analysis for that. All the visual
tools which people can carry in their heads and around them, or use
them on paper and show to each other. So we are not talking about
necessarily selling a major business or massive restructuring going
into an entire new market – it could be simply how they actually set
about their job strategically.
SM
One of the quotes that you said in the book was that people can fall
down some way between operations and strategy – what actually did
you mean there?
TG
Well for a start people think they are being strategic when they are
actually quite operational – they have not really started to think about
choices, the environment. And also there is a tendency to call
everything strategy or strategic in organisations. In one major
telecoms company about four hundred people had it in their title – I
said, well the word strategic, well have you actually defined it? And
they said no, I said that’s why we have problems. And also most
managers, pretty senior managers, either don’t go on these courses to
learn because their embarrassment, don’t have the time to do an
MBA, self taught, think that just SWOT analysis is going to get them
there or mainly just make mistakes and learn vaguely how to avoid
them in the future. So they don’t actually have the full map to get
there, so there are a whole number of reasons why people struggle to
migrate from operational to strategic – and the other thing to say is
that strategy isn’t just abstract, it's about operations anyway, you can’t
talk here purely theoretically about it. It needs to look at real tangible
things like real competitive advantage and real performance and real
positioning.
SM
Give me some examples of business problems that the approach you
are suggesting should be addressing.
TG
Well, there are things like some sort of team restructuring that
someone could be going through, or they have got a new boss that
they need to try and influence in a more strategic way. A project
which has an unclear direction, not really any kind of special resources
that enable it to get there with what we call the cunning plan tool. So
its generally that sort of level that you get started and even if you are
doing a full scale strategic plan at say, for example Tesco, you
wouldn’t take doing the entire plan for Tesco, you might take cheese
or maybe DVDs and that would be the unit of analysis and then build
up to the bigger picture, rather than necessarily always the other way
round.
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SM
So what is this cunning plan then? Tell me a bit more about that.
TG
Oh, well cunning plan that I take from Blackadder. It's about
achieving what you want to do in a novel way which has got some
simple elements, but some things that are quite surprising and which
if it is in a competitive context is quite hard for other people to imitate
or to take your position from you.
SM
What I would like to do is you have obviously got a lot of experience of
working with managers – give me some examples where the
approaches that you have suggested have been put into practice and
have really worked.
TG
Well, the most amazing example was perhaps eleven years ago when
I was used myself to facilitate and I was able to work with Tesco to look
at their non food business, which was minor scale at the time apart
from petrol – maybe is was about half a billion. Now it is actually
eleven billion, eleven years on and the tools we used were SWOT
analysis, we looked at growth drivers, we did the option grids,
stakeholders – not a vast number of tools, but the most important thing
was to actually work that through as a systematic process with some
competitor research, with some kind of alien thinking about where we
could go if the aliens landed with Tesco, and also future thinking – we
time travelled some five years into the future, saw where Tescos was
going to be in the future – saw it being dominant and then worked
backwards to how we got there and it gave the team the confidence
for the first time to actually go for it and that was quite simple on the
basis on their success.
SM
Great. One of the things inevitably that is going to happen is some of
your ideas don’t work out the way managers or you thought they were
going to – are there any examples of that, and particularly why they
didn’t work so well?
TG
Well I had one recently because I knew it was always going to be a
difficult one – there was a charity and basically we did some excellent
work generating options, the octopus generating no less than 80 lines
of enquiry for them, which were then about priorities. Unfortunately
there was so much politics around and lack of clarity about what the
chief exec had actually positioned as being the strategy previously that
the whole thing ground to a halt. So it just emphasises the fact that it
is not just an analytical thing, its not just creating the cunning plan, but
it's very, very much a behavioural and political thing. Having said that
there is a tool buried in the book called the peace, about we are not
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going to be political, pedantic, etc. Had I used that earlier on, then we
would have been perhaps in a slightly different space, so it just shows
that the stuff I put in book, you may just think that’s only on 343 and
just a throwaway comment, but it is all of value.
SM
If I were to pick out some key messages from your book, what would
you like to leave people with?
TG
Well, I think that you don’t want to have the average plan, you want to
be inventive, to be truly inventive it's like being an artist, you have got
to do some work, go back to it, critique it, make it better we call that,
at Diageo (Guinness Group), the building challenge process. So you
are building things, you challenge it , you are in and out of that. So
it’s a very iterative process, very creative and that means you have to
take a variety of different perspectives – it's not just about the tools.
So that is, I think, the most important message. And also perhaps the
fact that it does – as in the Tesco case – give you an awful lot of
value, not only at the business level, but also in terms of your career.
SM
Is there anything that you would like to add that you think we have not
covered, that we should?
TG
Just quickly then, I think you were asking earlier about if I were to write
it again today, are there any things that I would emphasise even more
– I think number one is the importance of being cunning or, not
devious, but being inventive in terms of the influencing process. I
think that that is a key blockage or enabler to help people to do this
and there is a lot more stuff on that. There is also emphasising more
the cunning plan, I know that actually that comes into its own
particularly when dealing with stakeholders so there is probably more I
would emphasise there and I think the last two things are scenarios – I
have always been a believer in them, but I think they should be more
central and not just an add on to the strategy process, story telling the
future and the final thing is that actually working recently in the mobile
phone industry myself, it just emphasises that the imitability – if you do
something, what are the others going to do. Trying to make sure
there are sufficient barriers to other people just copying you – it's just
so important, especially in very dynamic industries and I think that goes
back to resource based theory of competitive advantage, which is a
big theory obviously. But some of the simple stuff around that is still
not getting into management practice, which is try to identify your
unique resource if you can, if you have got any at all. But if you have
got something like that or a unique plan you have got to try to make it
more stealthy or protect it some way – making it generally a lot more
resilient because you can’t always rely on competitors being weak.
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SM
Tony Grundy, thank you very much.
TG
Thank you.
Transcript prepared by Learning Services for the Knowledge Interchange
www.cranfield.ac.uk/som
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Cranfield School of Management
Produced by the Learning Services Team
Cranfield School of Management
© Cranfield University 2007