The Strategy You Already Follow

Abstract

Every organisation follows two strategies, the one it wrote and the one its decisions add up to. It is nine o'clock on a Sunday evening in January, and the chief executive of a firm that makes and services commercial kitchen equipment is at her own kitchen table with a laptop, a glass of water and a spreadsheet her finance director sent on Friday. It lists every request for money, people and time that the executive team approved last year, one line each, with the date and the reason. There are three hundred and twelve lines. The house is quiet. Above the table a single pendant lamp makes a circle of warm light on the wood, and the rest of the room is dark. The strategy the board approved a year ago fits on one slide, and she knows it by heart: grow the service business, so that by the end of the decade the firm earns more from keeping kitchens running than from selling them. She sorts the spreadsheet by purpose, twice, to be sure. Most of last year's money went to the equipment business: a new production line, a larger sales team for the new range, a second warehouse.