CHRIS POTTS

It’s been a long, long time. Hasn’t it? At least it seems like it has, while I’ve stayed away from just about everything work-related, on medical advice, because of a serious, traumatic and potentially life-threatening episode. So, back to what it’s all been about, starting over 30 years ago. Working with people on strategy, applied to a diversity of subjects. The most prominent was often their strategy in respect of Information Technology, which was - and probably still is - one of the subject areas in which many other strategies converge.  Applying strategy to the subject of Information Technology, rather than having an “IT Strategy” was the foundation of FruITion, the one-off book that resulted in a trilogy then a saga. So, what is strategy? I deliberately offered no hard-and-fast definition. For sure, expressed in English, and maybe other languages, it’s one of those ambiguous topics we write and talk about, in which there’s a capability (strategy) and each entity it produces (a strategy). Like, investment and architecture, two related capabilites/entities we mention a lot. Mind you, a word-search of FruITion for “strategy is” exposes that I wrote it 24 times, in different contexts and phrases. The one that's here, I saw someone include in a conference keynote, kindly mentioning where that influence came from, soon after my book was published. Feedback, indeed. Being born an anglophone, while learning French at school and having lived in France for numerous years, I know there’s a fundamental ambiguity in English around that word “you”, which my quote includes three times. Does it mean one person, or a group of people? In French (for example) is it “tu” or “vous” ? Whichever you consider it to mean, is fine by me. Worldwide, English is widely used as the lingua franca for topics like strategy, when people from multiple backgrounds want to communicate with each other. To interpret the actual consequences of what everyone's expressing, demands an understanding of the cultural context - national and regional cultures, and the enterprise’s own culture. “You” - as in my phrase - can even mean an entire nation. I wrote my second book (RecrEAtion) as a travelogue, to explore and share the practical implications of that rather mighty thought. Nations have strategies and cultures, expressing who they are, determine what they actually do, and influence what other nations do. That third factor - influence - being the patterns of choices made by other nations. Those patterns may be achieved deliberately and/or discovered emergently. There. In reality, rather than in writing, strategy is … both deliberate and emergent. Something I learned by working with other strategists and from reading authoritative works. My third book, DefrICtion, explored that potential dichotomy, where the strategy’s subject is Investing in Change (hence the IC in the title). Anyway, enough about books. It’s about time I tried some hands-on work again.