The physician entrepreneur's guide to strategic thinking

Mention strategic planning and the usual images are boring meetings, nothing that gets done, large notebooks that sit on the shelf, and, maybe, going to a delightful place with food that's better than pizza or what they serve in the hospital cafeteria. It does not have to be that way, and, if it is, you might be reading your own corporate obituary soon.

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze and effectively break down an issue in order to make a decision or find a solution. At the heart of critical thinking is the ability to formulate deep, different, and effective questions. For effective questioning, start by holding your hypotheses loosely. Be willing to fundamentally reconsider your initial conclusions — and do so without defensiveness. Second, listen more than you talk through active listening. Third, leave your queries open-ended, and avoid yes-or-no questions. Fourth, consider the counterintuitive to avoid falling into groupthink. Fifth, take the time to stew in a problem, rather than making decisions unnecessarily quickly. Last, ask thoughtful, even difficult, follow-ups.

Here are some things you should know about strategy:

1. Strategic planning (derived from the Greek word , strategos, meaning generals) is about creating a plan that asks who you are, where you are now, where you want to go and how you want to get there. In many instances, a strategic plan is neither a strategy nor a plan. And this brings us to this consultant's definition of strategic planning: designing a system whereby the various key stakeholders of an organization interact to produce a virtuous circle that is, in turn, a source of sustainable competitive advantage.
2. Strategic planning is different from strategic thinking.
3. The clinical value pathway starts with domain expertise and evolves into strategic thinking
4. Strategic thinking can be learned. Jeff Bezos explains how here. However, many are not built to do it.
5. Strategic thinking is about connecting dots in a expanding universe or ecosystems and networks.
6. Innovation starts with an entrepreneurial mindset that is, in part, fueled by creativity.
7. Strategic thinking derives from entrepreneurial habits that gets you from thought, to said to done.
8. If you want to know what's wrong with a patient, just talk to them long enough and they will tell you. The same holds true for customers but sometimes it's harder to get them to tell you the truth and to listen to it.
9. Intuition is part of the art of strategic thinking, just like making a diagnosis
10. Sometimes, like in clinical medicine, it is better to be lucky than good and be right for the wrong reasons.
11. Here are some ideas about how to bridge the strategy-execution gap and flipping the top down model.
12.  Industry disruption, as Accenture research has found, is reasonably predictable. And with wisdom about its predictability comes opportunity.

The problem with strategy frameworks is that although they can help you determine whether an opportunity is attractive or whether a given strategy is likely to work, they don’t help you in the task of identifying the opportunity or crafting the strategy in the first place. This article introduces a framework, built on an in-depth analysis of the creativity literature, which aims to fill that gap by providing a systematic approach to identifying potential strategies. The framework categorizes all strategies into the following four groups, from the least creative to the most creative: adapting an existing industry strategy, combining different existing industry strategies, importing strategies from other industries, and creating a brand-new strategy from scratch.

 A common piece of developmental feedback is the need to move from tactical to strategic thinking. But what does that look like?  This author, who has coached thousands of leaders to help develop their strategic thinking capabilities, has identified three core behaviors to work on: acumen (thinking), allocation (planning), and action (doing).

To get ahead in the business world, it’s not enough to think strategically. You also have to effectively communicate those ideas. There are several ways to do this, including elevating the conversation to focus on the big picture and broader context, being forward-looking in your comments, anticipating the effects of potential decisions, connecting disparate concepts, simplifying complex issues, using metaphors and analogies, stimulating dialogue with questions, showing you are informed, actively listening, and seeking feedback.

Major contending forces, says Michael Porter, this expert on business strategy, determine the state of competition in an industry: the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of customers and of suppliers, the intense rivalry of competitors, and the threat of substitute services or products. Once the corporate strategist has assessed these forces, he can identify his own company’s strengths and weaknesses and act accordingly to put up the best defense against competitive assaults.

Porter's model has evolved and winning is more about preparation and execution.

  Can you summarize your company’s strategy in 35 words or less? Any strategy statement must begin with a definition of the objective, or the goal that the strategy is designed to achieve. Since most firms compete in a more or less unbounded landscape, it is also crucial to define the scope, or domain, of the business. Perhaps most important, companies need to have a clear sense of advantage—that is, the means by which the business will achieve its stated objective. What is your goal? Where are you going to play? How are you going to win?

In her book, Learning to Think Strategically, Julia Sloan found it takes five critical attributes to think strategically:

Having an imagination

Having a broad perspective

Juggling incomplete, inaccurate and competing information

The ability to deal with things over which you have no control

The desire to win

Once you have determined these, then you can apply it to 3 horizons framework.

If you want strategy in action, the ask your people these 5 questions:

• What are you doing today? This will bring to light any significant work that you aren’t aware is being done or that’s taking much more time than it should.
• Why are you doing the work you’re doing? This allows you to gain clarity on what’s important and why it’s important from your team’s perspective.
• How does what we’re doing today align with the bigger picture? This is a discussion about gaps and outliers. If your team is working on something that doesn’t align with the broader goals of the organization, challenge the value of doing that work.
• What does success look like for our team? This allows you to hone in on what’s really driving your team’s success, in terms of activities, behaviors, relationships, and strategic outcomes.
• What else could we do to achieve more, better, faster? This is where you push your team to be innovative. If you’ve done the work to answer the preceding questions, you are well-positioned to be strategic in answering this one.

One way to inform your strategic thinking is to create a strategic thinking group that includes not only those inside of your organization, but invited guests from outside of your organization and industry to help you identify divergent opportunities and intelligence.

This author presents six ways to incorporate strategy into your daily practices.

Identify the actions that matter

Focus on the most important problem

Explore the choices you face

Master the capabilities required

Create alignment between elements of the strategy

Assemble the resources you need

Strategy is the composite of execution steps. Today’s successful companies close the strategy-to-performance gap with a new strategy approach best described as “Decide-Do/Refine-Do”. This agile, test-and-learn approach is better suited to today’s tumultuous environment. It also helps bridge the chasms that exists at so many companies between great strategy, great execution, and great performance.

Here are five more lessons on how to to close the strategy-execution gap.

Strategic leadership is the ability to handle complex problems for which there is no obvious short-term solution, in which the stakes are high, and in which influencing others is essential. There are at least seven challenges where your choice of a High Ground or Low Ground response will help determine whether you advance as a strategic leader.

I see a lot of newcos hiring Chief Strategy Officers. It would help if some them were humanities or arts majors in college or played in a band before they went to Harvard Business School.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship