e-Strategy Pure and Simple
Chapter One
Strategic Fuzziness

For the last 20 years we have worked with over 400 companies in dozens of industries and countries helping them, with a process we have developed called Strategic Thinking, formulate and deploy a successful business strategy. The main reason that CEO’s have used our process is to overcome a phenomenon we call strategic fuzziness.

In any company, the strategy and direction of that organization should be set by the CEO with the help of the top management team. The strategy should be clear and explicit so that employees understand and can use it as a filter or target to make intelligent and consistent decisions on behalf of the company over time. Unfortunately,in most companies, the strategy is implicit and resides in the heads of a few people at the top while the rest of the staff have to guess and grope as to what the strategy is every time they make a decision.

Another element that adds to the difficulty of understanding the strategy of the business is that most people cannot distinguish between strategy and operations. In other words, they cannot separate strategy and strategic thinking from operations and operational thinking. Although both types of thinking go on simultaneously in every organization, we have observed that these are practiced with different degrees of proficiency.