What exactly is accomplished when corporate culture sits everybody down and has a power point about the strategy, business goals for the next year.
Stuff like saying “our new plan is focusing on areas like key player, resilience and fast resource adaption to better serve customers”. Stuff that seems super abstract and boil down to “worker faster or harder” or saying that whats important to the company are “customers, excellent products and people who make products” but said over an hour and mixed in with corporate jargon
It seems like a ton of work goes into these things but its all not usable information. So what is it that these scrum master project managers and higher executives hope to achieve at the end of these calls?
Well, most of the time, faulty leadership and bad hierarchies fail to construct coherent strategies. But, strategy is supposed to be the guiding lead to a whole organization’s activities. A good quality strategy implementation has clear goals in mind and can be used to elaborate clear and concise mission statements for all the functional parts of the organization. A “focus on resilience” can be translated into many things at an operational level, but it’s way too vague at an strategic level. Why do they want to be more resilient? is the appropriate counter questioning here. Better serve customers, how? Why key player?
It’s different from “focus on production resilience to respond to customers regardless of adverse market circumstances”. That is more actionable. It’s part of the strategic responsibilities of middle management to translate that into tactical operational actions and communicating them to individual staff. For example, product design can create redundant packaging alternatives that use different levels of different materials, so shipping can respond to material shortages without incurring too much delay. Logistics can call for cache storage of production critical materials. Then factory can come up with the production plans for each packaging alternative and a contingency plan in case of shortages. Then acquisitions can scout ahead of time the different vendors for materials that would be required. Finance has to come up with a plan to finance the new storage caches. Marketing and sales can come up with reward plans to compensate customers on delays, and advertisement messages that spin negative circumstances into positives, etc. This is just one possible line of actions, out of infinite possibilities depending on industry, product and structure.
That’s a well formed strategy. Now, just giving a hollow presentation to an all hands meetings is not the most efficient way of communicating but yet again, a lot of incompetents make it into management without having a damn clue of what is their job.