Dean Scott Beardsley: Process

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From the course by University of Virginia

Strategic Planning and Execution

215 ratings

University of Virginia

Strategic Planning and Execution

215 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Business Strategy

Avoid the pitfalls of strategy planning and execution with the tools and skills from this course. You'll learn the pillars of strategy execution--analysis, formulation, and implementation--and how to use the 4A model to effectively approach strategy execution. Finally, a panel of leaders from entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and industry, share their expertise gleaned from years of successful strategy planning and execution.

From the lesson

Practical Perspectives

This week we welcome guest speakers from a range of industries, from startups to nonprofits, to share their expertise from years of successful strategy development and execution. They'll communicate their best tips to help you develop your strategist's toolkit. We're also fortunate to be joined by Darden's Dean Scott Beardsley, whose 26 years with McKinsey informs the concrete tips he shares to improve strategy development and execution.

Dean Scott Beardsley: Background2:51

Dean Scott Beardsley: Perspective14:05

Dean Scott Beardsley: Process6:28

Dean Scott Beardsley: Advice4:34

Meet the Instructors

Michael Lenox
Senior Associate Dean and Chief Strategy Officer
Darden School of Business
Jared Harris
Samuel L. Slover Research Chair in Business Administration
Darden School of Business
Scott Snell
E. Thayer Bigelow Research Professor in Business Administration
Darden School of Business

In terms of the process for determining a strategy, how do you go about it?

I would say there's a few lessons learned from my experience.

The first I would say is, go back to those elements of strategy that I spoke about

before, and ask yourself, is my process including the following?

Do I understand what I'm solving for?

For example, is it clear what my aspiration level is?

Is it clear what my mission is?

If you don't know what you're solving for, it's very difficult.

Are you optimizing for your mission and a stated level of aspiration or

are you seeking to understand what your aspiration level is?

If you don't know what your aspiration level is,

it's very difficult to make a strategy.

Because your strategy will vary depending on

the aspiration level that you're setting out to achieve.

So that's the first thing, is, if it's not clear in your mind,

what it is you're solving for, and what your stated level of aspiration is,

you're not going to be able to solve your strategy question.

It'll be an endless process.

So, that's number one, understand what you're solving for.

Number two, think back to the things I said.

Does your strategy take into account uncertainties?

Does it render some of them explicit?

Does it even ask yourself what are the variables in my model

that might be changing?

And do I have privileged insight to how I think those might be changing?

That's the second thing, does it render uncertainties clear?

Number three, how are you getting your data?

Have you thought about whether or

not you're just copying things when it comes to external analysis?

Or are you really getting privileged insight into the market and

into the countries?

And are you taking a long enough horizon

to understand where the value creation might be?

Strategy is really not about the next quarter, or about the next four quarters.

It's about creating longer term value creation.

And as you all know, as good students of finance, that the terminal value of

a company is created in years three, four, and five and after.

That's where most of the value creation happens.

So you need to take that into account.

Does your strategy take into account granular outcomes?

Does it look at countries, and

does it look at markets at a very specific level, at a granular level?

That is where the level of resource allocation often happens.

Have you thought about those granular levels?

That's another very important thing.

Have you considered your biases?

Have you thought about who is on your team?

Have you thought about who might be challenging your process?

That's another important component of any strategy.

And is one of the end products of your process, is it a action plan that really

takes into account what you're capable of executing with the leadership you have.

If you package all of that together,

those are some of the things that you need to have in a strategy.

But what I will also tell you is a lot of people believe

that strategy is all about a point answer or just an answer.

I would reject that.

What I would say is that in my experience how you run your process

of strategy is often as important as the answer itself.

That is especially true in places where there is

a lot of stakeholders that feel that they should have an input.

For example, at both McKinsey and

at the University of Virginia there is a heritage of shared governance.

And what that means is that in order to develop a strategy for McKinsey,

you need to be able to get the input of all the partners that own McKinsey.

In the same way at a university, the faculty and

other stakeholders such as boards of trustees, or your alumni base,

or your administration, feel that they too own part of the process.

And they deserve an input into what the strategy should be.

Should you choose to decide that you are just smarter than everybody else, and

that you will tell everybody what their strategy should be,

because your blindingly brilliant insights lead to

a very insightful answer that you then bestow upon them.

It will be rejected out of hand.

It will not even be listened to because the process was not an inclusive one.

So when I say that the right strategy leads to some actions, and

it leads to an integrated set of actions that lead to a desired aspiration level.

I also mean that it has a chance of getting approved.

And that means that you need to have included in the process in some way,

in a thoughtful way, those that will ultimately need to approve it.

How do you go about the process of buy-in?

Because the best ideas will be dead on arrival, if you've not run the process in

a thoughtful way to get other people's input.

And moreover, it may be that some of those people

have insights that you wouldn't have on your own.

And so maybe one of my lessons learned is don't be intellectually arrogant and

think that you have all of the answers.

A brilliant strategy process will often unleash

a lot of ideas that you would not have gotten elsewhere.

And those processes,

in a way you could call them a form of crowdsourcing, in a way.

It needs to be thoughtfully done, depending on the size of your enterprise

and actually thinking through who needs to be given an input.

You don't do a strategy from the ground up involving tens or

hundreds of thousands of people either.

That being said, you don't impose it top down with 3 people telling 100,000 people

or even 1,000 people or 500 people, if we're talking about Darden, how to do it.

You need to get input from many different people.

So those would be some of my lessons learned on creating strategy.

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