“You could boil all of Search [the book, “In Search of Excellence”] down to three words: People. Customers. Action.”

You read further and then find that Peters actually wrote a piece years later undermining the need for a business strategy at all! Controversial when you work for a strategy consultancy, but ho hum. What he was really saying with that succinct phrase was “Get great people motivated to succeed, keep close to your customers, and get on with it! (i.e. a bias to action)”. Sure you might have a great business strategy, an okay business strategy, or no strategy at all – but that’s less important than having a motivated work force, knowing your customer and actually doing something.

A lot of later literature on company performance has evolved from some of these principles that Peters and Waterman  professed. For example, Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” is an obvious descendant. And the now well-known quote that “Culture Trumps Strategy, Every Time” is rooted in this perspective.

And it’s a perspective I love – there’s a real danger with modern businesses to think that the culture of your organisation is just some dull fluff stuff to do with foosball, free cokes and not having to wear a tie. But it’s not – the way people work, the way they like to work together, the behaviours that are encouraged or discouraged, whether the right people get promoted or demoted, the interview selection criteria, the management structures and goals – all this is, for me, even more important than the specific strategy plan you happen to be following this year. If you can get your people aligned with that strategy, then the multiplicative effect of that can be enormous. If you ignore your people, then your strategy will come to nought.

A nice analogy was given to me a year or so ago about these elements of organisational effectiveness. Your company performance is a like putting on a play. You have:

1. Your Environment: where your theatre is based. There’s little you can do about this, though you need to keep an eye on what’s going on in your neighbourhood, and adjust accordingly.
2. Your Business Strategy: the script. This is what you’re actually doing, working on.
3. Your Capability: the actors who are delivering the play.

The point is – you can have the best script in the world, but if your players suck, or aren’t motivated towards excellence, the play is going to suck either way. But of course it’s not just about the players sucking, it’s actually about their motivation to make the play great – yes, they need the skills, but do they form part of a trusted team? Are they given the appropriate autonomy? Do they have clear goals? In essence, are they supported by the organisation, or held back?

It’s this sort of question that you need to look at if you feel that your strategy isn’t quite going as swimmingly as you thought. Maybe it’s not the strategy, maybe it’s the support structure for your people and the culture you’ve created? Or maybe you drifted too far from your customers? Perhaps you’ve been blocked organisationally so that you couldn’t get on with your work? (On the last of these: there’s one thing I can guarantee – if you don’t do a piece of work, then you certainly won’t have any impact!)