Corporate Strategy

Strategy is really about foresight–having the skills necessary to see what could happen and planning for it. Success is really about overcoming failure. No matter what you do, you will experience some failure, and the ability to overcome the failure is what separates successful enterprises.

When Dev Sarwal teaches about corporate strategy, that is the first principle. The second is to try and chart all possible outcomes and to react quickly. It is better to react and get it wrong than react not at all. If you react, and you get it wrong, then quickly reverse course and correct what went wrong. Keep doing that till you get it right. The OODO principle!

If you react, and you get it wrong, then quickly reverse course and correct what went wrong.

Most of what Dev Sarwal has learned in corporate strategy is taught at business schools worldwide. Dev Sarwal attended Duke University, and spent several hours each week auditing some of the business school classes. The most important experience he received, however, was while working at Wal-Mart at their corporate headquarters. There, he not only strategized with some of the best in the business, but we made our share of mistakes. And we learned plenty from those mistakes. 

Corporate Strategy

Strategy comes to us from the Greek word Stratos–which means an army to lead. The leader would be looking at every possible scenario in planning an attack or defending against one. As the word moved from French and then to English, the spelling obviously changed, but the underlying meaning of evaluating all possibilities and scenarios remained the same. To me, foresight may be the single best quality you can find in leadership.