Strategy and Vision Analysis

Digging through some old files this afternoon to find this sketch from ’95.

After I had decomposed a Senior Executive’s Strategy and Vision to find some of the major weaknesses and suggest mitigations, he asked me into his office.  He had only put out the document a few hours before.  Mind you I had just joined the company a few weeks before when I sent the critique; other’s had warned me that was a career limiting move.  That this Executive didn’t like criticism.  So when he called me into his office shortly after sending my assessment.  Well you can imagine I figured; it was going to be one of the shortest careers in the company.

To my surprise and delight, he gushed over my assessment.  Saying it was a brilliant piece of analysis and wished others in his organization could do such.  All he could ever get from his subordinates was a weak “Because we’ve always done it that way” or other “I just don’t like it without any rational explanation.  His next request during the meeting was simple,  he asked me how I could do such so quickly.  I pulled out some paper, sketching out my process as I describe how I performed each step, and how each step fed the next in line.

Today I’m still analyzing strategy and enterprise architecture, design and construction; though my tools have matured some what, the objective of each step are still the same.

 

I guess the saying the more things change the more they stay the same still rings true.  Though many don’t realize, most of the new solutions touted are really the same ones from the past, just masked in newer technology