Blog 1 - Connecting the dots

One of the most important take away from this week’s reading was that there is no one single best strategy. The best strategy depends on several factors among which the type of market is one. Reading about 4 different types of strategies namely classical, adaptive, shaping, and visionary has helped me realize the rationales of some of the decisions taken by my past employers.

I was working for a service-based company in India in 2013, and their revenue was declining because their competitors were signing the deals from their previous loyal clients. When the reasons for this shift were researched, it was concluded that the other companies had better fit employees in terms of the skills required for the client’s work. I remember hearing from my senior employees that the company is unable to come up with a strategy that can solve this problem. The software architect who I worked with opted to help the company and in a year the company could see a drastic positive shift in revenue and the architect was heavily praised. 

He collected all the projects that different clients had requested in the recent past but for which no deals were made. He then analyzed all of them and tried to classify projects based on several criteria like its domain, employee count required, etc. He then suggested the Human Resource team to hire engineers with those specific talents and who are flexible to work on new domains. Meanwhile, he started small proof-of-concept projects on the domain on which there were higher demands. Within 6 months, the company achieved 2 main goals: one, they had a large pool of talent relevant to the current trend in client demand and who were flexible, two, there were proof-of concept-projects that were useful to prove the clients that they can be trusted with work on the specific domain. 

According to me, the initial strategy of the company to have strategy meetings every 6 months was the company trying to follow the classical strategy approach. Whereas, the company shifting to continuously analyzing the client requests and training employees based on the current trend was an example of an adaptive strategy approach. It is a good example to show the effects of a misfit strategy and now when I look back I can connect the dots owing to the readings of the week.