Purpose of Strategic Thinking
“Growth should not be, and is not, a strategy. It’s a tactic.” He recalled visiting a Starbucks store and finding a table of teddy bears for sale. Concerned that this type of merchandise had nothing to do with coffee, he queried the manager of the store who explained that the bears were boost- ing the store’s monthly sales. Schultz realized that the coffee chain had strayed far from its mission and values in its emphasis on this sales metric, which is but one way to measure the health of an organization. In response, Schultz and his team had to engage in a new line of strategic thinking to create better strategies that would deliver customer value and satisfaction and bring the chain back to its roots (Webb, 2011).
It is not possible to create a strategy without using strategic thinking. The quest to find workable alternative strategies—one component of the strategic-planning process—is essentially strategic thinking in action. Discovering the strategy that is “right” for a company can result in a higher market share, a new competitive edge, or discovery of an uncontested market space, all of which is accomplished through strategic thinking. In the Starbucks example, after a period of strategic
The Origin of “Thinking Outside the Box” A phrase we often hear used casually in everyday speech in business, “thinking outside the box” is a useful metaphor for communicating how ordinary people can actually create extraordinary value when working together in organizations. The phrase comes from a famous puzzle in mathematics known as the nine-dot problem. Visualize a page with nine dots arrayed in three rows of three dots each. The objective is to draw four straight lines that connect all of the dots, without lifting your pen- cil from the paper.
The puzzle seems intractable because we immediately assume we are bound by the imaginary square in which the nine dots are arrayed. Of course the puzzle is impossible to solve with that constraint, but the instructions never mentioned any restriction. Most people simply assume this boundary and thus are limited by their perceptions or mental model. The solution requires that three of the four lines extend outside the space defined by the outmost dots (see below). Hence, the metaphor “thinking outside the box” refers to thinking outside of the normal mental models that influence the way we view the world.