A few weeks ago I saw a brilliant LinkedIn post from a Founder that I follow and learn from. On first read the statistics it quoted were surprising. Microsoft was 18 years old when they released Windows. Lego was 23 when it launched the bricks system. Disney was 32 when it opened their first theme park. Nike didn’t crack $1m revenue until year 10. What shocks you on first read actually makes quite a lot of sense the more you think about it.
Great things take time to nurture and build. Disruptions can’t always be delivered in weeks and months. Talk to any successful founder and the path to their epic exit is always a constant journey of learning, adaptation and execution. That’s not the full story. Alongside imaginative product development, brand extensions and scaling of the business there is usually a core enduring idea. In my mind this is more mission than purpose. A clear idea of an enduring and impactful role in the world backed by a robust business model.
Great missions galvanize us. By demanding a lot, they nurture invention and ingenuity to respond to the challenge. This alone isn’t enough. Endurance through the obstacles and growing pains must back it up. Any strategy assignment for us starts with the origins of a business because in those early sparks of success is usually the timeless, enduring idea that is now surrounded by today’s execution. Some of which will be on point, but plenty will be off the mark. That is inevitable with the short tenures of CEOs, CMOs and management teams.
Of course, the enduring mission on which your brand is built is the jewel of your business. The everyday priority is to keep it alive, relevant and robustly delivered to the consumer. However, I want to talk about the time aspect specifically. If you buy the idea that success comes from big ideas and can take time, how is it possible that so much of our energy is on the urgent in business today? Some of it is clearly external, especially in the last 15 years with one crisis after another, but it goes deeper.
We like urgency. We demand action. We often judge a team on how many things they are doing and how quickly they add activity to the plan. Agility is seen as key to business. Or is that a management myth? I have rarely seen significant evidence of rapid consumer changes (caveat highly unusual events like COVID-19, many of the effects of which were temporary). Rather I see consistent evidence that what consumers want only changes very slowly. Same for customers, we have helped several clients with gaps in their channel strategy, especially eCommerce. Yet the underlying trends of winners and losers have been years in the making and the lack of adequate response can’t be explained by dynamic markets or short leadtimes.
Here is the rub. Most businesses have - and should focus on - very simple enduring missions with continuous improvement creating value. Instead, they focus on the short term and urgent. They get distracted from the core. The negative consequences of this are accidental. It is a simple fact that time is inextricably linked to degrees of freedom. What we can influence in 3 months is a fraction of what we can change in 3 years. If your team only manages in the moment, they may very well execute tactically brilliant plans and deliver great short term metrics but the opportunity cost on what could have been built with a better balance is the hidden price. This dynamic is what drives most strategy reappraisals when tactical management runs out of road, and it always does within 12-36 months. Then a refocus is needed, which often means a return in some form to what really matters and how to get better at it over a true balance of time horizons. That’s how you move the needle on value creation. That’s what a coherent strategy does and why great strategy matters.
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