A Strategic Huddle with Jerry Jones?

The strategy behind the X's and O's

Recently, I plugged "strategy" into Google.com and instantly got back more than 4.3 billion entries. 

Google's search results revealed a myriad of interpretations of strategy, ranging from military and diplomatic strategies to business, gaming, and gambling strategies.  It even unearthed examples of organizational, educational, environmental, and investment strategies. 

Google's findings led me to links from elite colleges and universities, each presenting their unique take on strategy, often in stark disagreement with one another.  Even within the same institution, different departments hold entirely contrasting beliefs about strategy. There is much confusion, but it’s not limited to academia.

Policymakers are confused as well. Instead of a national strategy, they gravitate towards the National Security Strategy as the preeminent national-level strategy document. When they do speak about national strategy, they make things a bit murkier by calling their ruminations "Grand Strategy." -As opposed to the more everyday garden variety, I guess- And worse, they use the terms strategy and plan interchangeably so that no one is ever sure what they're talking about.

Perhaps it's fitting that they muddy up the water with clever wording. It appears that they have already been engaging in "Grand Economics" for years.

This series on strategy aims to cut through the confusion around strategy in a way that helps policymakers and the general public better understand each other. In our first post in the series, "Strategy for… the Rest of Us," we identified both a standard definition for strategy and a set of shared precepts that are the same regardless of which profession, discipline, or level the strategy is being created for. 

The second post in the series, “Bill Gates Beyond Time,” followed the adventures of Bill Gates, version 97.0, as he traveled through time to see the effects of the strategic decisions that he made in 1997. Along the way, he helped us learn a few things.  The most important being that strategy has no end-state because the game (competition) never ends. 

That lack of an end-state forces us to rethink our understanding of strategic goals. Our goals must be steady-state oriented (designed to maintain a certain level of performance or equilibrium) instead of end-state oriented (focused on achieving a specific outcome). 

Bill Gates ver. 97.0 also taught us an essential lesson regarding the resourcing of strategic lines of effort (means). Because the strategic time horizon is not “on the clock,” resources do not have to be on hand; they can be developed.

We also learned how fortunate we are that Bill ver. 97.0's lawyers can't reach us here in his future :-)

Strategies are developed when plans will not suffice. If you have a problem that can be solved, develop a plan and solve it. Strategies are designed to confront wicked problems that must be continuously monitored and maintained. It is the nature of wicked problems to change and morph in ways such that there will always be a threat.

In this final post in our series on strategy, we turn towards methods. Strategy development can be delegated to any level, but strategic actions must be directed from the top and must include the efforts of every piece of the organization. All methods (ways) are considered and directed towards the strategic effort.

Strategy is tied to an organization's purpose; it is not a subordinate line of effort. Therefore, all other lines of effort must be subordinate to the strategy.

At the national level, for example, national security is not a purpose unto itself that demands a strategy. National security is a strategic line of effort in support of the National Strategy.

For a more common-sense illustration of how this works, we opted to use the most cliche of all analogies: the sports analogy. Unfortunately, when we tried to reach out to Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, we didn’t get a response. Although, we’re sure that once he reads this, we will hear from his lawyers.

Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys in 1989. The team won three Superbowls in the early 1990s, but after those three Super Bowl wins, they have had little on-field success for almost three decades.

Was Jerry Jones thinking strategically when he purchased the Cowboys? Is his strategy successful? Does he need to develop a new strategy? These questions are more challenging to answer than they appear.

If we were looking at this from a planning perspective, there are tons of ways to drive this analogy. There are offensive and defensive tactical plans to win individual plays, operational-level plans to win specific games, and a campaign plan to string together enough victories to get the Cowboys to the Superbowl. But none of those have anything to do with strategy. To understand Jerry Jones' strategy, we need to view this example through a much wider lens, giving us a better perspective.  

In 1989, Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys for $150 million. For a moment, let's pretend that we were Mr. Jones at that time, figuring out how the Cowboys acquisition fits into our strategy.  

In that strategy, with all its tactical and operational subcomponents, Football Operations forms only one of several campaign plans within the "Sports Franchise" strategic line of effort. Football operations is both supported by and supports other campaigns like sports marketing, sports merchandising, and sports real estate. Jerry makes a fortune off of that giant punt-blocking jumbotron perched at the top of AT&T Stadium.  

As we move up a level, the Sports Franchise strategic line of effort is one of several partnered strategic lines of effort that work in concert. These include:

• Sport Franchise

• Oil and gas production

• Residential Real Estate

• Hospitality Management

• Food and Beverage Services

• Investment in Fine Art (Mr. Jones owns artworks by Norman Rockwell, Picasso, Renoir, and Matisse) who knew, right?

• Philanthropy/Public Relations

Mr. Jones even ingeniously developed a strategic philanthropic/public relations line of effort that facilitated his success. His philanthropy created an atmosphere receptive to his acquisition of large amounts of resources.

In our example, winning football games and Super Bowls is not an indicator of the success or failure of the strategy.  In fact, without winning a Super Bowl in the last 27 years and only averaging playoff appearances in 50% of their seasons, the value of the Dallas Cowboys has skyrocketed.  Today, the Dallas Cowboys are the most valuable sports team in the world, with an estimated value of $9 billion.¹ ($150million to $9billion in 35yrs)

The Football Operations Campaign Plan IS focused on winning the Superbowl every year. But it would be naive of us to believe that is Mr. Jones' strategic goal.

Instead, Mr. Jones has identified a desired steady-state focused on intergenerational wealth. His goal is to ensure his wealth and his heirs' wealth in perpetuity. Defining his desired steady state was the key to strategy development and the only "constant" in his efforts.  

Mr. Jones attempted numerous lines of effort leveraging many different resources (means) and methods (ways).  Ultimately, he discarded each in its turn if it did not produce movement towards attaining (and maintaining) his desired steady state.  If the sports franchise line of effort had not moved him closer to his desired steady state, it is reasonable to assume that Mr. Jones would have scrapped it as well.

The lesson that Jerry Jones teaches us is that strategy has no fixed “ways.” The best method is the one that works most effectively, which almost always means using multiple tools in concert.

Of all of the foundational characteristics of strategy, this is the one most easily accepted as universal.  However, in practice, confining strategies to "fixed ways" is the most common violation of norms that we find in strategic development.  The reason is explained by the old saw about the carpenter who only owns a hammer.  Every problem is a nail. 

In fact, the easiest way to differentiate between good strategists and charlatans is to look at the ways and means that they propose to execute a strategy. What we find is that the producers of bad strategy almost always find the ways and means available to their organization to be the most applicable. Naturally, that makes their organization the most appropriate way to attack the problem set. 

Going back to our carpenter….  Many so-called strategists purposely describe every problem as a nail.  Since their organization is the only carpenter with a hammer… they set themselves up as the most appropriate way to solve the problem. 

We don’t have to look far for examples. The strategies produced in a given year by our government agencies are cases in point. They are not documents that seek to assess the competitive environment and then describe our position in relation to our global competitors.  They do not identify the most desired and least acceptable steady states.  They do not seek joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multi-lateral lines of effort designed to place us (U.S.) in positions of advantage in relation to our competitors. In effect, they are not strategies at all.

The reason is apparent. These strategies are not written to solve our strategic dilemma.  They are written to solve the budget dilemma of the publishing agency. Most government agency strategies are actually funding plans written for tactical and operational reasons.  Any first-year MBA student would quickly recognize a government agency strategy as a business plan that seeks funding from Congress.

Instead of bombarding policymakers with hundreds of self-serving business plans, we must develop a comprehensive national-level strategy that leverages every means.  We cannot look for military, economic, political/diplomatic, or informational answers to our strategic challenges; we must leverage all our ways simultaneously and continuously across the entire strategic problem set.

A few years ago, Micheal Shurkin wrote a pretty good article about French General André Beaufre entitled "Grand Strategy is Total." Beaufre came to understand (I'm paraphrasing) that strategy is everything. It is not tied to a single method. All ways and means must be focused on strategic outcomes.

We are long overdue for a plain-spoken discussion about strategy.  By any measure, we have developed a potentially damaging misunderstanding of what strategy is.  

Across all disciplines, strategic thought has lost context and become so niche and specialized that it no longer makes common sense.  Just as common sense has proven to be "not very common," it is likewise uncommon to encounter much good strategy.

In our next series, we’ll pivot from our foundational discussion on strategy to talk about security as a component of a National Strategy. What exactly do lawmakers and citizens mean when they talk about security? Unsurprisingly, they’re talking about two very different things!!

1. Jerry Jones (forbes.com)