Line-of Sight is a communications agency helping corporations and organisations to ensure value in the huge resources spent every day on communications.
Can you tell what your strategy is? In most companies the answer is no. Is it then hot air for a company to have a strategy? Of course not, but professors Collis and Rukstad from Harvard Business School has collected evidence, that most successful companies don’t have one.
In the real world strategic goals change rapidly. The message from the past weeks news in Denmark is clear. Scandinavian Tobacco Group buys back a number of Norwegian companies a little more than a year after divesting them. ISS is lowering its ambitions to acquire new businesses. Dong Energy has put its fiber business on the sales list. Danfoss considers a divestment of its refrigerator compressor business. Random stories from a world where tax rules, capital markets and competition changes constantly.
But how do companies then explain to their employees and stakeholders outside the companies, what they want with their business? In such a way that everyone in a company can work on achieving the same goals, and in such a way that the outside world will understand and accept what the companies are doing?
Well, most companies neglect to deliver this explanation in a clear language. With the substantial losses in engagement and possible deterioration in the framework conditions that can be the consequence.
An economical crisis will always lead to restructuring, also this time where the crisis is unheard deep. But when restructuring picks up even more it is really unfortunate for most Danish businesses, that the myth saying that every orderly company must have a deep and well explained strategy is so widespread.
Companies make strategic decisions without being governed by a solidly rooted vision, mission and strategy. And the different members of the top management express themselves differently on the company’s strategic decisions.
It would be promising if more companies would chose the approach to communication to explain to the outside world that they certainly have strategic objectives for the near future, but that it is not meaningful for them to have a textbook approach to strategy, because things do not develop linear, but messy and chaotic. Then it would be easier to get well through the restructurings.
A both open and determined approach to conducting business in an ever changing world, and an empathetic approach too.
Maybe it would then also be possible to achieve a better dialogue internally in companies between the different layers of management and employees about, what will happen in the near future, and what is the meaning of it, and maybe it will even lead to a better understanding from the outside world in a company’s dialogue with the external stakeholders, which makes decisions on the framework conditions.
Well, maybe even customers would get a clearer perception of a company, its products or services and brand.
This opinion was published in the leading Danish business daily Børsen 4 June 2009.
News
Social media
The development online go hand in hand with a tendency, which has existed in many years in communications: New white paper on social media. April 2010. Download paper.
Overloaded managers
Communications departments demands much too much from middle managers. Opinion in Børsen 1 October 2009. Read the article.
Success without strategy
Most companies can’t say what their strategy is, but they should change. Opinion in Børsen 4 June 2009. Read the article.
Twitter and PR
The leading business daily Børsen focused on the possibilities in social media communication, when covering Line-of-Sight 27 May 2009. Read the article (Danish).