Strategic everything equals strategic nothing

Business is now awash with strategy and almost none of it has anything thing to do with strategy.  The word strategy or strategic is just put at the front of existing terms to make them sound mystic and important and it is all basically bollocks.  Goodness knows it is rare enough to find actual strategy rather than check box exercises or the annual rewrite of the mission, vision and values (and I'll return to organisational values in another blog soon as that is an interesting aside).

This morning on the business news site I subscribe to I saw the following headline -
APN New & Media, publisher of the New Zealand Herald, has appointed Deutsche Bank to undertake a strategic review of its media assets.
If we take the word strategic out we have -
APN New & Media, publisher of the New Zealand Herald, has appointed Deutsche Bank to undertake a review of its media asset
And so the question is of course what is the point of the word strategic except to make it sound important and justify the appointment of very expensive consultants.

Unfortunately if this was an isolated example it would be interesting but when I saw this it was the straw that broke my blogging back and I just had to write about it as the business community is now inundated with strategic everything.  I went to Google news and typed strategic business and this is what the headlines (all from the last 9 hours) say:

  • Harnessing Strategic Business Growth
  • APN undertakes strategic review of its NZ assets
  • While we have already taken significant strategic steps to transition our business to the new digital media landscape, we are excited about the financial ...
  • The first in the industry to link both business strategy and portfolio strategy with transaction management and execution, PortfolioCommand(SM) combines ...
  • Supertankers Delayed in China as Nation Fills Strategic Reserves
  • Bar Harbor Bankshares Announces Strategic Acquisition of Border ...
  • The company selected GlobalEnglish after an exhaustive search for a strategic communications partner capable of providing a global, scalable solution that ...
Admittedly a couple of those stories are strategic but the rest use the term for aggrandisement and the bottom line is the word is now generically used instead of the word 'important' when it needs to be used at all.  

I plan to double my charge out rate as a consultant in the future as I no longer plan to read anything, I will be strategically reviewing documents.......

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