Dev 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
Stratus–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.
