I had the pleasure of attending Will Humphrey’s APG online conference yesterday, set to Talking Heads’ song Once in a Lifetime questions.
The talk was titled “How to get the most out of your strategy skills.” I had understood it to be about the ways [communications / marketing / brand] strategy skills can be useful or transferrable to other jobs/careers.
Will shared his experience of working at McKinsey and how it differs from his past experience planning and strategy in agencies. It was insightful and valuable to hear his perspectives on lyrical questions of large automobiles and beautiful houses.
I’ve certainly been feeling the days going by quickly, whether I let them or not. I also regularly ponder where that strategy highway goes to, I’m still not sure.
In the meantime, and in the spirit of enjoying the journey, I thought I’d offer a few broad points about what the strategy highway seems to be made of. My (probably obvious) take on the broad question of getting the most out your strategy skills.
- Adding value, helping out.
We touched on this a bit towards the end of the call. At least in the world of brands and marketing communications I have worked in the most, the strategy is really adding a different and valuable, yet probably not strictly necessary, dimension. In pop culture, I think of New Amsterdam’s Dr. Goodwin wandering around and asking everyone: ” How can I help?” To make the most out of your strategy skills, perhaps consider for yourself how you help best, or just ask like Dr. Goodwin.
- Listening, reformulating.
The next logical step is to listen keenly, find out what the issues, challenges, and problems are. You can read this elsewhere; I thought people wanted my brilliant ideas, but that’s rarely the case. It goes along with reformulating to make sure you’ve understood, and the person (client, co-worker, boss) you’re listening knows you got what they were saying.
- Contextualising, simplifying.
Then perhaps, you can also ask questions and add context. We tend to love analogies for this, as well as acronyms, or frameworks. It’s not in the things or diagrams themselves that the value lies though, it’s in the context they provide, making things simpler to understand, reformulated in a way that sheds new light on a challenge and opens the way to solutions.
All those seem important to developing strategies, foundations the highway is built on, wherever it may go.
