Choosing Strategy: How I decided to hitch my professional wagon to the single most important thing in business

When I look back on my days playing basketball, I realize that strategy drove me and allowed me to be competitive. Now that I don’t play anymore, I look for ways to compete and it turns out that the strategy behind my work helps to feed my competitive nature. Over the past 13 or so years, I have gained the skill necessary to be more of a strategist. This was validated the last time I took the Strength Finders test and one of my top five strengths was strategy. I take those tests every few years to validate and inform my current style of work. In 2019, I paused to figure out what was necessary to compliment the strategy being developed for economic development in the City of Sacramento.

In my current role, there have been more requests for me to consult, speak, and mentor. I jumped into these opportunities to stay sharp by sharing and teaching what I have learned while admitting that I am a competition junky. One of the speaking engagements I had was at the University of Southern California’s Sacramento campus. I was invited to speak to the inaugural B.U.I.L.D. (Blacks United in Leadership Development). A lot of the questions asked during my time was about executing strategy.  While there I met Kenny Sadler. He is the principal consultant for Berkeley Strategy Advisors, LLC. Turns out that Kenny and I had met back in 2011 and hung in similar crowds back in our college days event though he went to Cal and I attended Santa Clara University.

Much to my surprise, the B.U.I.L.D. coordinator reached out with a request for me to mentor Kenny. As a mentor, I typically ask my interns and mentees what their goals and growth objectives are so that we can build a plan for their success. After speaking to him and trying to understand where he wanted to go, I worked with my colleagues to see if there was an opportunity for him to support one of the programs I wanted to role out based on the city’s economic development strategy. Turns out there was a great way for me to help him sharpen his skills. Now he is currently serving the City of Sacramento’s Department of Innovation and Economic Development as a second stage business consultant and program administrator for their new economic development pilot program, called Economic Gardening 2.0.

I wanted to introduce you to Kenny. He is a fellow strategist and I thought he should share a bit about how he got into strategy development and why it is so important.

Tell us a little bit about your background and why you were part of BUILD?

I spent the bulk of my early professional career as a hired gun in corporate sales and sales management. But after spending the previous 6 years studying business strategy as an entrepreneur, I was hired by a community-based organization to lead community economic development strategy. In the course of this work, I found myself fighting for policy change (writing analyses and arguing in front of the city council, the state legislature, and regulators). Needing to know more of the movers and shakers at the State Capitol, I was encouraged to apply to BUILD in order to increase my network, my visibility, and my understanding of how policy is created.

How did you get introduced to strategy?

After a decade of only having experienced the sales and marketing aspects of business, I found myself in a general management roll in 2003. After sharing some of the challenges in my new roll, I was introduced to strategy—as a discipline—by a friend, Ron Chandler, who, back then, was a management consultant. He was one of the smartest and most respected businesspeople I knew; so, I sought him out to help me with some growth challenges we were experiencing at the small firm I was running. After listening patiently, he concluded: “Y’all need to choose a strategy!” I had no idea what he was talking about, but after hiring him, I was entranced by his ability to bring clarity and solutions to our complex business problems. I knew then, that if I ever went into business for myself, I would want to wield that kind of sophistication and precision as I helped others.

How did you transition into strategy work?

Well, quite frankly, it was a slow process. When I decided to be an entrepreneur, there was a ton of self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy (my closest friends, including Ron, who is currently the CIO at Harvard Business School, all had Ivy League MBAs or graduate degrees in business-related disciplines; and they had all worked for Fortune 50 companies or big strategy firms). I, on the other hand, had an undergraduate degree in Rhetoric and had never even taken an accounting, finance, or economics class in college. So, I started out doing small sales and marketing related projects while I learned strategy in my spare time. I dibbled and dabbled in strategic projects when I felt they were small enough that I could use Google to pull me through. But my mind was determined to fake it till I make it.

So, with no real strategy experience and no MBA, how did you make it?

In 2013, after developing into a pretty good marketer and entrepreneur, I was reunited with a classmate from Berkeley, who had done his MBA and Ph.D. at Harvard Business School and was now teaching strategy at USC’s business school. I was amazed! Since we had lost touch, he had become a leading strategy scholar. I knew he loved to teach and that if I was a committed student, he would teach me everything I needed to know. After years of formal, hardcore training with him, I gained the knowledge and courage to not only be a business consultant but to be a strategy expert.

Why business strategy versus some other business-related specialty?

That’s easy! Strategy is said to be the chief work of the CEO, the one thing by which everything in competitive business rises and falls. Good strategy is the single most important success factor in business, and my ego wants me to be a giant in this lofty field.

Plus, strategy will become increasingly necessary as rapid advances in technology, and droves of entrepreneurs flood the business scene. Competition will continue to be fierce, and without good strategy, companies will eat away at each other’s profits, shrink markets, and create red oceans filled with blood from a zero-sum game. Armed with good strategy, however, businesses will compete for the blue oceans of new markets created by the innovation that strategy inspires.