In this episode, the Soulful CXO dives deep into the world of leadership, strategy, and execution, with a unique twist - the humanist approach.
Guest: Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, Strategy & Leadership Author, CEO & Business Strategist
On LinkedIn | http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeroenkraaijenbrink
On Forbes | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeroenkraaijenbrink/?sh=60140eba3848
At University of Amsterdam | https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/k/r/j.kraaijenbrink/j.kraaijenbrink.html?cb#Profile
On Amazon | https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B072MZC831/about
Host: Dr. Rebecca Wynn
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/rebecca-wynn
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Episode Description
In this episode, Dr. Rebecca Wynn has a fascinating conversation with Jeroen Kraaijbrink, an expert in strategy and leadership. Jeroen discusses the importance of a reality check in strategy development, the need to break down complex strategies into easily digestible concepts, and his innovative strategy-making approach. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your journey in strategy, this episode is packed with practical advice and inspiration.
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Dr. Rebecca Wynn: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Soulful CXO. I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Wynne. We are pleased to have with us today, Jeroen Kraaijenbrink. Jeroen is an accomplished strategy educator, speaker, writer, and consultant with over two decades of experience extending from academia through modern business and industry. He is world renowned for empowering people in organizations to discover, Formulate and execute their future plans by providing innovative tools for expansive and forward thinking strategy, making for personal and organizational development.
He enables individuals to realize their greatest ambitions and organizations to effectively achieve their business goals and mission through ongoing effective strategy techniques. Drawing from his cognitive psychology, Humanism, martial arts, St. Benedict, and extensive range of other sources. He has written numerous articles on strategy, [00:01:00] sustainability, and personal leadership, as well as authored five books.
The one hour strategy, strategy consulting, no more bananas, unlearning strategy, and a strategy handbook. He is an active contributor to Forbes, and a Top Voice on LinkedIn, writing about strategy, leadership, and how to embrace and harness the complexity, uncertainty, and opportunities of the global marketplace that the world has become.
Additionally, he teaches strategy at the University of Amsterdam Business School. Jeroen, it's great seeing you again. Welcome to the show.
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: Yeah, thank you for this wonderful introduction. Glad to be here.
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: You have a diverse background. That's very extensive too. How did you start in the world of strategy?
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: Yeah, I had to teach it as a young university lecturer. So I did my PhD. And [00:02:00] while doing that, probably there was a vacancy for that course, like a first year strategic market management course. And I gave the course and started to like the topic. And ever since, I think that has fascinated me also, because it's kind of this integrated view on organizations and not just like one specific function.
It's not just marketing, just finance, just HR, but really how do all these work together. And yeah, that has kept me interested my entire career so far.
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: Companies really struggle with strategy. Why do you think that we struggle so much on coming up with a strategy?
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: Yeah, that's a fascinating question.
Um, because I do think it's not really necessary. Uh, and. If you look in, in how we talk about strategy, how strategy is taught, [00:03:00] the textbooks, I think we are making life quite difficult and have kind of learned a rather peculiar way of what strategy is and how to generate it, how to execute it. So, if you look at the typical textbook, it is, uh, it's often a collection of models.
Like every page you turn the page, there's a new framework, there's a new model and so on and so forth. So it looks like strategy is this kind of activity where you have to fill in 25 models, do a lot of analysis, and then magically come to a good direction for your, your company. So I think part of it is the, yeah, the research, the teaching, uh, how we have been.
Promoting strategy in a not so effective way, and that's what we what we see embraced in companies as well. This is also. And I know this is not really just answering your question, but a little bit more than that. One of my main drivers [00:04:00] in my entire career, as I said, I started teaching strategy, but quite soon became dissatisfied.
So I heard myself talking, I was working with students and teaching them Porter's five forces framework, balance scorecard, BCG matrix, and so on and so forth. And while doing so, I became increasingly dissatisfied with how is this helpful? It's interesting. It leads to some findings, but how, how does it really help a company move forward and create the strategy that they can, can execute?
And, and based on that, I've, yeah, I've. Moved on at the university and then became consultant and started writing books in order to come up with a, with an approach that is more useful, more, more applicable, more complete, more leading to more executable strategy. So, that has been the lack of suitable approaches and the, like, overly promoted, [00:05:00] not so suitable approaches.
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: Can you walk us through an example on effective strategy versus a really poor strategy and how that cripples maybe a company or an individual?
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: Yeah, there is. I think there's a lot of, and of course, it's easy to sit on the side and criticize someone else's work or to criticize an existing strategy. I realize that it's easier than doing it yourself.
But if I look, I've seen quite a few strategic plans over over the years and what the general. Observation that I had. It's okay. It looks impressive. It looks interesting. But now what? What do I need to do? What's the action? What's the change? How is this different? So a lack of clarity, lack of precision, a lack of accuracy in in being able or maybe even to be willing to express very clearly.
This is how we did it so [00:06:00] far. This is how we're going to do it from now on. This is how it's different. And this is what we did. You know, what we need to do in order to get there. So that that lack of clarity has been, I think, one of these big issues in many strategic plans. And I do understand it because it's not always easy to be precise.
Um, and it's also kind of scary to be precise because if you are precise in your strategic plan, then someone can tell you after 2 years, like, hey, you're not on track. You're not doing what you intended to do. And as long as you keep it vague. Uh, yeah, you can always kind of create a story that you're still doing, doing okay.
Uh, so that lack of clarity is, is one of the main issues I see in, in, in many strategy plans.
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: One of the things I see is, is companies want to rush to tactical very quickly. What do I just need to buy? What do I just need to do to make it happen? And I don't always see them being very thoughtful about where they [00:07:00] want to be in three years, four years, five years.
What's their WHY. Why do they want to be there? Who, who were they trying to, to target market wise in different places along those lines? That's what I see at least from technical perspective. It's just what I need to buy today. And that's why I think they also fail in every other. It seems like every 3 months that they're changing not only the strategic plan, but their tactical plan is because they don't have that clarity.
Is that what you see too, with a lot of companies, and why they fail?
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: Yeah, that is quite interesting. You mentioned this and one of the principles or mottos or quotes I have in my, my, my book, The Strategy Handbook is "speed it up by taking it slow" and it's exactly describing what you are describing, uh, what you're describing is the rush towards execution.
And I can also, I can understand once you have spent months and months and months and. Thousands and thousands of dollars on creating some sort of plan, then you're very impatient and want to rush to action. The fascinating [00:08:00] thing is that in many cases where they say we have developed a strategy and now want to move to execution.
The actual thing that's missing is the strategy. They have defined like high level ambitions. Objectives, targets, themes, vision, so whatever high level, this is what we all want to achieve and then jump to action initiatives. What is missing is the, what I think is strategy is, is it's basically a business logic.
It's a logic describing how your company creates value and can. Captures value. So who are your customers? What are you offering? Based on what competences with whom? What's the revenue model? How, what kind of cost? And how do you create a sensible logic in which all these elements fit together? And that story, that logic is often missing in what people call a strategy, while actually the whole thing that is [00:09:00] missing is the actual strategy.
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: How do people work through trying to ferret out what those areas are that you just mentioned? Is there some steps or processes they should flow to go through there? I know a lot of times CEOs might get together with their board of directors. Maybe they together with. Um, you know, whoever owns them by venture capitalists and they come from a very high level where it's a revenue model, but that really makes it hard to drill down to the other departments who are trying to figure out what their strategies and their missions and their visions and tactical plan should be to, to actually roll up to make those models.
So how, how do you make that? A corporate wide really strategy that rolls down very effectively.
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: How long do we have? There's a long answer, of course, because it includes quite a few steps.
Um, but just to summarize it is a couple of. Principles of a couple of things that I always [00:10:00] do when I'm working with a with an organization. One is having a very participative process is make sure that people from different layers, different roles and functions and different experience ages. So have a very diverse team representing the company.
Not just the top, uh, not just, uh, so it's a diverse team. That's one ingredient. Then in terms of steps, um, I find it very important to start with creating an understanding of the status quo. Because that's where things already already go wrong is people and you will be surprised. Maybe you won't be surprised, but many people are surprised how different.
People already think about how things are today. So that's factual. And if you ask, like, like your purchaser and your controller and your marketing person or your engineer or whoever, they have a different [00:11:00] view on who is the actual most important customer on what is unique about the products and services, about costs, about competences and so on.
So. I pay a lot of attention to creating this shared understanding of the status quo. And once you have that. The rest becomes relatively easy because you also identify where are the weak spots, where are the ideas, how is it different from what we're doing today? So, usually, if I work with a company, I have a couple of half day sessions with this diverse team, starting with the status quo, then make an assessment of.
Against a set of criteria, then do, um, like idea harvesting, idea generation, and all of that creates for me all the input I need to subsequently turn that into a coherent story. So, the way I work with my, with my clients is always use these sessions for [00:12:00] the most diverse input I can get. To create a very rich picture of a company and where they wanna move and where they should move.
And then my task as a strategy consultant is to turn those fragments into a co, into a first draft of a coherent story. So what I, the way I work, I'm, I'm almost like a ghost writer with, uh, with a client I write on, on behalf of them trying to express where they feel they should move. given the market, given what's happening in the company and so on and so forth.
Um, so that's the corporate level and the same, you can kind of repeat at the business unit level, division level, department level, but then in a shorter, quicker way, using the inputs from the corporate, um, process. As an additional input in your department unit division process.
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: Do you find that companies seem to confuse initially?[00:13:00]
What is our mission? What's our value compared to what is our strategies? Cause I see that a lot of times there's a lot of misalignments or the mission and values or something they put on the wall, but it doesn't seem to line where. Where those strategies want to go. And that seems to cause a lot of strife and confusion in the workforce.
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: Which is, I think another reason, which may also be caused by the way we've been teaching strategy for, for decades is there is this idea that every company needs a mission, a vision, core values, and a strategy. And this whole template, it's kind of broken. Uh, it, it doesn't work. Uh, and because if you, if you look what people write down, uh, what a mission is, what a vision is.
What's the difference? How do they relate? And to be fully transparent here, I have never so far in my entire life created a vision or a mission for a company, uh, because that's not what I do. I find it much more important to, to talk about. So, so values I think are [00:14:00] important. So what do we care about? What are some guiding principles?
What, where are the boundaries of what we find acceptable? What do we prefer and so on? But I find what I find much more important than mission vision is identity and ambitions. So identity is who are we? What kind of organization are we? Are we a consulting company? Are we a service provider? Are we a pharmaceutical company?
Are we? So what really the essence of what type of business are we, or what type of organization are we? And ambitions are, okay, where do we want to be an X number of years from now? What are the directions? So yes, because of this kind of Almost mandatory templates, mission, vision, values, strategy, a lot of companies kind of struggle like, okay, we have to put it in that structure.
Oh, you don't also when when prospective clients have asked me, can you create a mission and a vision for us? My question is why [00:15:00] and probably not. And so we go down through the process that I just described using the tools that are that I developed. And then the question kind of disappears because what they don't what they really ask for.
It's not a mission. It's not a vision. It's not even a strategy. It's clarity about the direction of the company. Making choices, channeling the energy on what should we focus on or what should we not focus on?
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: That makes sense. Cause a lot of companies. It amazes me when you do look at those missions and visions and goals and stuff like that, the executives might've changed the company might've even changed on who they have acquired, for example, or what parts of the companies they've sold off and you're like what you stood for 10 years ago or 15 years or 20 years ago is really where the company is.
Isn't today and so it seems like they don't even reevaluate those to go along with the strategies and in the technical plan. So the people who do [00:16:00] have a mission and vision because marketing, for example, people expect them on the website. How often do you think people should really. Review them with their staff.
I would think that you should do that at least as often as you come up those strategic plans, be there a 3 year plan, 5 year plan. I will tell you personally, I think those companies have come up with a 10, 15, 20 year plan. I don't know why it seems like those never come to fruition. But what do you see?
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: I think one, two, two answers here.
One, one is I think the general principle that I try to use is monitor actively change reluctantly. So, yes, review very frequently and see, has the world changed? Do we need to change this? But change reluctantly. I think try to stick to what you have as long as you can, not beyond that. So really, as long as it's healthy for a organization, because the whole point of.
Strategy, but also mission vision and everything [00:17:00] related is to create some stability stable frame of reference in a changing complex uncertain world. So, if we are throwing this away, like, every year, then we lose the whole essence of what strategy is about in the 1st place. Um, the other thing about. How long, um, I think it's relevant or useful for companies to think in terms of horizons, like you have your, and I'm not talking about really the short term, more tactical operational stuff, but strategic horizons where probably 1, 2 years is just like.
Fix the status quo, like Horizon 1, where you won't radically change in that short period, but it is important to think about the strategy of your company. And you have Horizon 2, 3, maybe even 4, where you look at 2 is more like, okay, what are we going to invest in, in terms of innovation? What kind of new [00:18:00] business lines, new product market combinations?
And 3 and 4 is much more disruptive. How do we need to reinvent our company? And for even how do we anticipate the change of the ecosystem? We're in. So, and it is useful for this. Some companies, not all the time, but to have these long term, um, thoughts and at least some attention to to thinking about.
Okay. But how. How is this industry changing? How is it different like 10 years from now, not to kind of reason backwards and sets objectives for every year in between and create a very complicated detail plan, but to create awareness of how things could be different. Compared to today, but usually when I work with, um, with with a company, I have like 2 cycles.
One is a 3 year cycle where we do a serious redefinition of the strategy every 3 years. And in my [00:19:00] case, when when I say strategy, I haven't explained it very much. But the tool I use for that is what I've called the strategy sketch. It's. Like an ontology of what strategy is. It's opening up the black box. It consists of 10 elements and values and goals, organizational climate.
So those elements related to mission, vision, and so on are basically included. They're not necessarily the starting point. They're just 1 out of 10 elements that are also relevant to review. So we review those 10 elements seriously and challenge them seriously every 3 years. So then the attitude is, let's challenge, let's see what we need to change.
The years in between, you basically try to stay on course. So you do a light update. After a year, like, okay, how are we doing? Can we still continue our journey or do we need to, to pivot? And then the attitude should be monitor actively change reluctantly. Uh, let's try to stick to stay on [00:20:00] course because otherwise we throw in too much confusion and change in the, in the company.
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: Do you find that companies try to take on too much and so, you know, there's end up being 10 or 20 priorities are all top one priorities. And so you can't execute on them because there's just too much that you're trying to put as a critical priority. Do you find that quite frequently or is that more towards startup and maybe medium sized companies?
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: Short answer. Yes. I find that frequently. The bit longer answer and that it's. Often one of the reasons that I work with them is that they realize a lack of focus. So it's also doing too much at the strategic level, too many different clients, too many different products, too many different processes and competences and too complicated.
Revenue models and costs and so on. So the, the making choices, creating focus, narrowing down is very often almost the main activity I do when, when developing the strategy. And then [00:21:00] indeed, um, this is a very natural human tendency. We are too optimistic. We cannot really anticipate and understand the complexity of things unless.
We have started executing them. So I think by almost by definition, you bite off too much in the in the beginning and find out that you can't do it all. And this is why before moving to some sort of action planning, I try to help companies develop a road map. And the road map is kind of in between your strategy.
And the action plan is kind of a high level. If we say three years from now, we want to be here. Let's just try and. Put down what do we need to do in year 1, year 2, year 3. One reason is it gives a sense of priority and logical order, chronological order. But the other thing is the reality check because my experience is, and [00:22:00] even on a micro level, when I, when I think about what I do during a day.
Once you start, when you start putting an order in that and say, okay, what do we do when then kind of a better sense of reality comes in. Um, so that's my way to avoid doing too much, starting too much before you actually start. So, because when you're still creating your roadmap, it's still very cheap because it's on paper, you can cross off, you can go back to your strategy.
And more often than not, you probably need to reduce. Your ambition level a bit, because what sounds great in the 1st round, and when you write it down, when you think about can we actually realize this. Uh, you probably find out no, probably not because we have, we can't stop the business for a year. Uh, we have, we have to just move on and we have a staff shortage anyway.
So who is going to do it? So this reality check [00:23:00] building that in at several points in the process is very important to avoid what you're describing.
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: One of the things you do really well is you break down those very complex strategies that can be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, depending on the size of the company, into small bite sized concepts that really almost anybody can actually grasp.
And that's one of the things that I've always enjoyed about your LinkedIn post. And I'm telling the audience out there, if you don't follow him, you need to be following him. How? How did you come about doing that? Because they're, they're great. I find them fascinating every day.
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: Great. That's very nice to hear.
And thanks for for advertising this. Um, probably I think a lot of what we're doing is to compensate for our own weaknesses or to to find a solution for our own weaknesses. So, if I look at myself personally, I think I'm, I'm very good at [00:24:00] taking in really a lot of information and then you're easily confused.
So I have a very strong need. To structure my thoughts, to structure the information that comes in, which is also what I just mentioned. The strategies catch is my, my kind of ontology to the tool describing what strategy is about. I need that because I don't understand the term strategy. I see so many different definitions, so many different elements.
I've read like 1000 books and everyone talks about in a different way. So I have a very strong personal need to simplify and understand these concepts and my process for understanding is, is writing. So all these posts, many of these posts before I, uh, start writing them, I have no, uh, clear idea of what the post is going to be.
Uh, so the clarity. It is the result. It's not the clarity up front. Of course, sometimes it's very clear because it's an existing model from someone else that I [00:25:00] describe and explain, but all the models that you find on LinkedIn that are my own are virtually always a result of me trying to make sense of, of this, this concept.
And for me, writing is really very, very helpful mechanism to create clarity of thought.
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: Do you find that pretty common that leadership out there, managers out there, or people who are just trying to be great in their field, that we want to be able to learn how to do this better, but like you just said, Education has just really failed us because they've had us to structure and they haven't allowed us to, I call it more "be in the flow of thinking."
You know, the old whiteboarding is, we used to do quite a bit. That seems to be gone anymore. Do you find that pretty common?
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: Yeah. There's a very, I think a very strong appetite for learning and clarifying and understanding these things because otherwise I wouldn't have that many followers, uh, like, because I started [00:26:00] doing this like a bit more than a year ago, August last year, uh, with like 5, 000 followers.
Now I have. 180, 000, something. Um, so that shows the, I think the appetite, the desire for clarity for the kind of things I write about. And yeah, and of course, I don't want to be just overly critical about others or about how things are being taught. I've been part of this system as well. I've been teaching the same stuff.
I've been doing the same stuff. So it's very. I think common that people, our society, our economy, we've been trained in a Particular way of thinking about our business, about strategy and even much broader, uh, especially Western society. We've been trained like, as left brain, rational, analytic, conscious decision makers.
And that's a very limited, um, model of. Of a person. Um, so we are much more [00:27:00] than that. There is the other half of the brain. There is our emotions. There's a body. There is all kind of other stuff. And the tools and techniques from the past do not include that at all. They are built on this kind of homo economic, because this is rational calculating human being.
So strategy has become very much a reflection of that model of the individual. And. What I do is based on I think what there is a trend that I think is going on is more and more people recognizing that this is not how real human beings are. And we are working with real human beings. And so we must change how we think about these concepts, whether it's leadership, whether it's strategy, execution, innovation.
Um, so I'm very much , and I think it's important to point this out, a lot of what I write is not original in the sense [00:28:00] that it's my invention. It's, I'm processing what others have done before me, and I'm just trying to package what others have created in a, uh, in an accessible way. But since you, you're calling this the Soulful CXO, I'm probably preaching to the converted here.
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: What you do is you bring the humanist back into thinking about. Strategy, how are you going to execute and how are you going to get people to, to execute it. Our time is totally flown by what's the best way for people to reach out to you for advisory services, speaking engagements, and to learn more about your company.
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: Uh, if you manage to spell my name correctly, then just Google me. You'll find me. I'm on LinkedIn. So there, uh, yeah, connect to me and maybe refer to that you heard this podcast, my website, Jeroen Kraaijbrink dot com, uh, and the recent initiative strategy dot Inc, which is a program for, um, internal and external consultants.
So, if you're interested in learning, let's [00:29:00] say. My, my approach to strategy and wanna use that with, within your organization or your clients, then Strategy Inc. Would also be a good, um, and of course, look, look, look up my books on Amazon or any other page. Again, if you spell my name correctly, you'll find everything you'll find is, is from me.
Dr. Rebecca Wynn: Jeroen. Thank you so much for being on the show. You are a Soulful CXO.
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: Thank you very much. It was, it was a pleasure being here.