Ivan Seidenberg
CEO, Verizon
Strategy is an issue that has evolved in my mind over the last fifteen or twenty years. If you go back fifteen or twenty years, you had to read Michael Porter’s work. You had to think about business models and strategic differentiation and strategic advantage and the long-term advantage in your business. And all of that is correct.
What I’ve learned along the way is, you need to take that plus one very important idea. And that is, the companies that have the best strategies are the companies that execute better than anybody else. Trick shots do not offset weak businesses; strategy does not compensate for poor execution at a business.
One of the things that works is, the better that you develop a culture around execution, the more options you have. What we’ve learned is, the more market share we take and the more we get ahead of our competition, the more we can do.
Let’s take an example of that. If you look at two things going on today -- take our wireless business -- a lot of people have wireless companies, and a lot of people have wireless licenses. We chose to decide that there is a differentiation that we wanted to create. We didn’t want to be a commodity provider; we didn’t want to be just a wireless company that was based on cost.
So one of the things that our marketing, sales, and management teams figured out is the expression, “Can you hear me now?” It was a way to explain to the customer that we understood their requirement. They didn’t just want a cool phone that didn’t work; they wanted a cool phone that worked really well.
That’s an example of strategy being born from great execution -- simple things like if you can complete the call, you can then do more things with your network. You can give customers greater products and services. You can create differentiation from your competition. And then you can build the business from that point on.
Another example: we’ve been in the telecommunications business for a long time. The landline business, the fixed-wire business, was shrinking like crazy. We could milk it, and we could put Band-Aids on it, but what we had that was most important was the direct relationship with our customers. We knew, if we could find a way to take our customers to the next place, we could do really good things in terms of creating growth for our business, our shareholders, and our employees.
We decided to go all nine yards, and we put in a plan to put in fiber optics directly to the home -- very ambitious. But this is where solid execution would now create addressable markets that would not have been available to the company had we not focused on the idea of execution first, strategy second.
If there’s anything I’ve learned over the last fifteen to twenty years, [it’s] you love strategy. You love to debate it, you love to have all these meetings about strategic intent, and you love to talk about the next ten years. But none of it works if the trains don’t run on time. And run better than your competition every day that you get up and go to work.
TAKEAWAYS
- Traditional strategy holds true today: think about business models, strategic differentiation, strategic advantage, and long-term advantage.
- Today, you must take that strategy one step further: the companies that have that execute better than anybody else.
- “Trick shots” do not offset weak businesses, and strategy does not compensate for poor execution.
- Develop your culture around execution, and then focus on strategy. Doing so creates new opportunities and sets you apart from the competition.
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Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpt from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk From the World’s Top Business Leaders: Executing For Results. Copyright 2008 Fifty Lessons Limited. All rights reserved.