Blog 4: Balance is Key to Executing a Winning Strategy

The Harvard Business Review Article on “Good Strategy Execution Requires Balancing 4 Tensions” by Simon Horan and Michael Connerty has a really good takeaway. I want to express my agreement with a focus on team dynamics. Going back to what Professor Zak says that “Strategy is about winning”, I am going to draw parallels from the article on which of my teams in the past have succeeded in winning and which have failed to achieve their goals.
All of us have belonged to teams and faced some kind of issue in working together – the vision does not align with everyone, there is apprehension in accepting a conflicting idea or there are a few people lacking in capabilities. Going back to when I was pursuing my undergraduate education, the first time ever I was put in a team did not go very well. I had a very misplaced ideal that a team that performed well has people who excelled in terms of capabilities and that their strategy was to put those capabilities into action. As a result of which, I never found my team winning whenever I felt someone lacked in capability because it eventually resulted in cross-cutting conflicts. Over time, as I grew older I realized there is a lot of merit in considering what the article talks along the lines of  ”Capability development versus pressure for results”. If anyone has ever tried out the Change Pro Six Sigma Simulation, you would know what happens when you try the tactic of “Use your contacts at Head Office to increase corporate pressure on the division to implement Six Sigma immediately.” It just upsets everything that was persevered up to that point.  More often than usual, a lot of teams fail to implement their strategy to win in a successful manner because they fail to achieve a balance among the contrasting thoughts of individuals in a respectable manner. These are the teams where you often here blatant "No"s being expressed when brainstorming ideas. I myself have often felt a pressure for results and ended up creating conflicts within a team. However, winning strategies are often not correlated to just capabilities. In the past 4 years, at work and during my graduate education, I have realized even those teams which appear the most unlikely to win can end up winning if they do two things better than everyone else. One, form a creative strategy to win that compliments each individual, and two, execute it in a way that brings out a synergy.

A recent example of this is the way my team worked together in the Deloitte Case Challenge this year. We had a balance of most tensions mentioned in the article and it worked out well for us. Especially in “balancing creativity and discipline” when it comes to presenting a solution that comprised of blockchain, crowdsourcing and the idea of letting loose an army of drones around a city. Each of these technologies is usually received with a fair amount of apprehension and we expected nothing less from the panelists. However, since the strategy we proposed for the case challenge was clear to each of us in terms of balancing “inspiring end-state versus challenging targets”, we were able to stick to our vision and hold our ground when questioned by the panelists. There was also some level of competitive advantage because of access to privileged information which draws from the McKinsey reading for this week. However, the main reason for my team winning is that we found a balance amongst each of our differences and executed our winning strategy smoothly as a team. This leads me to believe that balance is indeed key for execution of a winning strategy.