What Got You Here Won't Get You There

Strategy during the great social sector scramble

(h/t Marshall Goldsmith for the title)

Something I’m Learning

I’ve been spending a lot of time of late with social entrepreneurs in the start-up stage. (I’m also living that journey myself.)

The ones that stay up till 3am after putting their kids to bed, striving desperately for a breakthrough. The ones that wake up at 3am thinking about how to catch all the balls in the air if they fall. The excitable ones who flit from idea to idea without buckling down to getting one thing going.

For start-ups it’s always a time of gut-churning uncertainty. The will-they/won’t-they from investors, funders, customers. And while they decide, this constant effort to buy yourself time, build yourself runway, remember how to breathe.

It’s also a gut-wrenching time for leaders of any impact-first organization. Foundations are behaving like ducks (slow moving above, frantically churning below the surface) while watching anxiously for news from DC. International development firms – the big whales of social impact – have essentially been laid off and need to find new jobs (or feeding grounds). Big multilaterals are contracting, navigating internal bureaucracies while tossing about in choppy geopolitical waters.

The rest of the impact ocean relies on these three megafauna for subsistence, so their fates affect us all. When they get fat, everyone else does. When they get lean, it’s survival stakes all around.

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Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy has the clearest definition of strategy I’ve ever seen:

“The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors… A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision. A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them.”

In talking to organizational leaders facing the big strategic choices of this stormy present, I’m not always seeing a clear sense of

1. Who are we, really, and what do we excel at?

2. What is the core problem we face (beyond what politics is forcing upon us)?

3. Where do we want to get to?

4. What do we need to change to get us there, including what are we going to invest in to make that change?

5. Most importantly, what is the link between what we’re good at and where we want to go?

For example, if you’re an international development contractor who excelled at delivering to USAID spec, it’s going to be tough to survive by throwing things at foundation walls to see what sticks. You may need to invest in new capabilities, and that won’t happen overnight.

Or in Marshall Goldsmith’s legendary one-liner: what got you here won’t get you there.

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The one advantage start-ups have over big organizations is the ability to spot quickly and then accept what’s not working and move nimbly towards new waters, which is partly a question of size and structure, but also partly a question of mindset and culture.

On the other hand, there’s opportunity in being too big to fail: however well or badly they’re run, nobody wants the WHO to go under.

Everybody is playing defense right now. There are no easy answers.

Something to Consider

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wishes Stanford students an ample dose of pain and suffering.

Something to Quote

Betting on yourself—with nontrivial stakes for failure but attractive rewards for success—is a good general strategy for pushing the quality of your work to a new level.

- Cal Newport, Slow Productivity