Strategic science

This is the word that has been me fascinating since Mid 2009. Strategy happens everywhere. It is not the sacred thingy discussed at closed rooms, on corporate vacations, over a cup of drink in business-class hotels. Strategies are made by you, me and everyone. A women begging at the signal strategically chooses a signal that lasts more than a minute. A child at a super market strategically eyes for a candy and her mother strategically avoids it. Strategy is in every single moment of our life. Yet in business, strategists are considered are golden egg laying hens. They are treated as honchos. They get all the comfort in this world. They are best paid in the organisation. Why all these attention at corporates when we all are strategically sensitive?

At corporate level, strategic management is the most critical function. They set the direction for the entire business. What is a strategy - It is a systematic long term plan of action. This plan of action depends on various factors. It depends on an organisation's existing policies, procedures, control systems, position in the market, external environment comprising competitors, consumers, government policies and action, and other stakeholders. It requires a lot of inputs. It requires corporate appraisal both internally and externally to generate various alternatives. It is in most cases worked out scientifically. Strategists are statisticians and economists and they work out lot of significant theories and numbers and arrive at a course of action called their strategy for the company.

Going by the way corporates function these days and the level of importance assigned to the function of strategic management, it would be but to tend to the conclusion that strategy development is a science. If it is so perfect a science then why does it fail at all? There is something more to it. It is not mere science. If it is science, there is a definitive way of approaching and concluding it. But hardly we come across same strategy for a similar set of data and situation. This is because strategy also has a touch of human element in it. The people part of strategy making often can be taken as the lead as to how a strategy will be. The strategies will always depend on the person making it. It simply is not possible to detach human element from strategy.

And that human element which makes any strategy successful is intuition. A scientific process may generate a lot of strategic options but at last intuition of the entrepreneur or manager leads to the selection of the most successful alternative and most of the times, the successful strategy may not be even generated by the scientific methods adopted by an organisation. It comes out of repetitive learning and experience that goes into human brain. So it is not scientific strategies that are successful, it is the intuitive strategies that are behind most successful businesses in the past and will be in the future. Never count your intuition out - learn to hear to your intuition, you will be successful 9 out of 10 times.