Business, Politics, Economics, Leadership

The Financial Crisis became the Economic Crisis became the Recession became the Summer of (Non-)Recovery. One metaphor after another wore out its welcome as the press attempted to label the new age of uncertainty with a tag-line that would stick, yet here we are on the verge of the Fall and still in search of a narrative we can all agree on…

As I have written previously, business leaders who are waiting for it all to be over and hoping for a return to the good old days are playing a fool’s game that will at best barely delay disastrous failure, and at worst bring it on. I believe that this truly is the Age of Uncertainty, and that most attempts to organize and operate based upon a set of long-term assumptions about a stable future (traditional ‘Strategic Planning’) are inherently more likely to limit and potentially destroy your business than to enable and empower it to succeed. Doubtless some such strategies, in the short run, will appear successful – but the bigger the bet placed on a specific set of economic, political, technological, ecological or cultural trajectories, the harder the fall will be when (not if) several critical assumptions are confounded by a seismic shift in the underlying trend lines.

Instead, sustained success will go to those who adopt organizational and operational models designed to take advantage of volatility and uncertainty, who make a cultural virtue of adaptability and agility, and who internalize the new truth that there is no inherent predictability in today’s markets beyond the near-term horizon. I call this kind of thinking Insurgent Strategy,  a grass-roots, crowd-sourced, semi-instinctual mindset that amplifies responsiveness to leading indicators and enables the early identification of transient micro-markets, the rapid adaptation of products or services to meet new demand, and the ready abandonment of those same markets long before the demand curve reaches its tail, so that resources can be repurposed to the next opportunity.

Businesses that successfully adopt Insurgent Strategy will make many small bets on short-term futures, will become adept at short-cycle product or service development, will be comfortable with a portfolio approach and accept that there will be a standard distribution curve with respect to the performance of individual micro-markets. They will be culturally distinct from traditionally structured enterprises, and will exemplify a different set of core skills, use different tools and organizational models, and require different modes of analysis to assess their value as investment opportunities.

Stay tuned for future posts, which will further develop the Insurgent Strategy theme, identifying the characteristics of the Insurgents, discussing the specific tools they will need, and addressing how their practices will differ from those of the tradiional Strategic Planners.

Teaser: Insurgent Strategy can be used to exploit the “Long Tail“, so well described in Chris Anderson’s great book, where businesses can do very well from feeding micro-market demands abandoned by the Insurgents.  For such enterprises, which I call Scavengers, the bubbling opportunity is in fact the top of the demand curve for a transient micro-market, signaling that the Insurgents will begin moving on and leaving established but underserved demand behind.

The text of this blogpost generally, and the term Insurgent Strategy specifically, are copyright © 2010 Mark H Robinson. All rights are reserved.