The Shultzian Hour - Take Time for Strategy

Mark Ritson

The mighty George Shultz is dead. His name might not be familiar, but if you are old enough to remember President Reagan you will probably also recall his avuncular secretary of state. If you were a child of the Seventies and Eighties chances are you will remember a balding, besuited man stepping off planes into China or the Soviet Union with a twinkle in his eye – that was Shultz. He passed away on Monday having reach the grand old age of 100 late last year.

Shultz was that rarest of beasts in this time of Trump and division; a liberal Republican. He was also the subject of one of my favourite articles in the New York Times by David Leonhardt. The article looked back on Shultz's storied career and could have focused on a hundred different episodes in this great man’s life – from serving in the Marines to helping Mikhail Gorbachev set up a new Russia. Instead, it was all about something a little thing that only a select few knew about him.

Shultz told Leonhardt that he would scrupulously seek solitude for one hour a day, and sit with a pen and paper and nothing else. It was, he explained, the only way he could find time during some of the busiest and most frenetic weeks of the 20th century. He would leave specific instructions that only the President or his wife, Helena, were allowed to disturb him. And with the door closed he would engage in that most unusual of activities – he would think.

Without this precious hour of strategic time, Shultz would have been constantly pulled into the tactical immediacy of everyday life at the White House. He would have missed the bigger picture and the organising principles required to pre-empt and manage the more immediate challenges that he successfully responded to.

It’s an approach that Leonhardt, himself a noted writer and columnist, has tried to introduce into his own working week. Taking a ‘Shultz hour’ out from his busy life has not proven easy. The fact that he found it so hard was taken as further evidence of the importance of its introduction.

“I have confused the availability of new information with the importance of it,” Leonhardt admitted in his 2017 column. “If you spend all your time collecting new information, you won’t leave enough time to make any sense of it.”

Agility is useless without Strategy

By now you probably know where I am going with all this. We marketers are a frenetic bunch. We confuse busyness with success, and hours worked with impact. More importantly, we mix up the concepts of strategy (which is what Shultz was doing behind that closed door) and tactics (which is what he subsequently executed when he opened it again).

And when I say we “mix up” what I really mean is that we spend our days obsessing with tactical diaspora without first working out exactly what we are trying to achieve. The now obligatory new-year marketing predictions were brimming with the need to be more agile, to use artificial intelligence (AI) and big data to employ whatever techno-gimmickry is flavor of the week.

We marketers are a frenetic bunch. We confuse business with success, and hours worked with impact.

I am mightily suspicious of all of the above. Whenever I hear a client cry out for greater agility I wince, because invariably they are intent on jettisoning even their vaguest strategic principles for a roll-with-the-punches approach to planning. And of all the manifest attractions of AI, surely the most entrancing one for marketers is the idea you start with a random approach and let the machine winnow out the possibilities to reach the optimum approach through infinite testing and learning protocols. Who needs a strategy when you have the machine down in the basement learning as we speak?

Only the most inane marketer values big data over small data. Of course big data sounds good and fits with the current tactical zeitgeist, but it pales into quantitative insignificance against spending time in the places and spaces where your consumers exist, watching and talking with them and then – the tricky bit – thinking about what you have just seen.

I remain entirely and utterly amazed at the growing number of big brands who talk a very good game when it comes to tactical application and the latest bang-whizz approach, and yet when you challenge them on their brand strategy, meet you with the empty gaze of a child.

Strategy in three simple steps

Brand strategy is not rocket science. It’s not even the bigger, more complex stuff of corporate strategy. It simply requires that a brand can start the year with the answers to three simple questions. First, who are we targeting and – unless you are wearing the Byron Sharp commemorative underwear – who you are not.

Second, what is our position for the brand? Not the usual ‘Innovating with integrity for the people of the world’ brand-purpose balls, but rather what we actually want to stand for to that target customer we identified a question ago.

Finally, what are the handful of objectives for the brand and the coming year? Ideally there will be just a handful: nothing spells doom better than a marketer with a PowerPoint deck of eight, 10 or even 12 ‘strategic priorities’ for the year ahead. None will get done.

And sound objectives won’t be based on simply profit or sales or all that other macro-stuff. They will be based on a proper path to purchase and expressed in a SMART fashion (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).

If you have that, you have a brand strategy. And suddenly you know which tactics are relevant and which are not. Life gets immeasurably more focused, deliberate and successful. Kind of like you know what you are doing.

But to get that strategy sorted out you first have to take a Shulzian hour. Free yourself from all the articles about VR, the self serving blogs from lunatics telling you marketing has changed, COMPLETELY, and the old ways are DEAD. You have to close all that down. Switch off your phone, open up your Moleskine. Take a long, deliberate breath. And then think. And while you are at it, celebrate the long and amazing life of George Shultz - a proper hero of strategy and a great man that we lost this week.

Mark Ritson will teach the next Mini MBA in Marketing and also the Mini MBA in Brand Management this April. To book your place, sign up at marketingweek.com/mini-mba.