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Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy

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David Maister has written another very readable, logical, practical book that's brimming with common sense. It's for leaders who could use a Dutch uncle's bony index finger in their sternum to remind them of what they already know but don't have the focus and discipline to do day after day.

As a management consultant for the past 25-plus years, I've watched leaders struggle with defining, clarifying and implementing business strategies. They struggle because it's not easy work. It's like dieting or quitting smoking and staying with it. It's hard work.

Drawing on the diet/smoking analogy, Maister offers up useful ways to think about strategy--starting with having the right mindset. To this he introduces tools, techniques and processes to make strategy work...this time.

He's so usefully blunt with that bony index finger. "Real strategy lies not in figuring out what to do, but in devising ways to ensure that, compared to others, we actually do more of what everybody knows they should do." So, strategy is not just about strategy, but execution.

And commitment and resolute focus. "You can't achieve a competitive differentiation through things you do 'reasonably well most of the time.'"

And discipline. "The necessary outcome of strategic planning is not analytical insight but resolve."

And knowing when to say no. "Strategy is deciding whose business you are going to turn away."

Maister covers the gamut, from building ownership and accountability in the strategy (consequences for non-compliance), avoiding temptation, creating rules to live by, clarifying expectations and roles for leaders and overcoming obstacles that I have seen leaders struggle with over the years.

Of all the business books that flood the market these days, Strategy and the Fat Smoker stands out for its practicality, common sense and long-term usefullness. It's already a dog-eared reference book on my bookshelf.

Jim Shaffer
Jim Shaffer Group

Length:: 6:24 Mins

A look inside what will likely be the best business book of 2008. David Maister has collected decades of experience into what may be seen as the ultimate management BS detector. He shreds fads and provides common sense advice to people who are serious about improving leadership, management, and customer relationship capabilities. We'll look at each section and the content and format that makes this book so special.

It's a new year and you want to lose weight. You know what to do. Odds are, however, that you will not do it.

So it goes with professional service firms strategies. Every firm knows what to do but they just don't do it. Why? Because they aren't sick. Once they have that first heart attack things will change.

That is the central point David makes in this great book. He makes the point simply and effectively and this is a must read for every person who lives by the billable hour.

Heads of firms should skip straight to the chapter titled "The Chief Executive's Speech." Take it, put it on some note cards and give it the next beginning of the fiscal year all-hands meeting. This is what you should be saying instead of the things you've been saying before.

I hope to hear that some firm has ditched their current strategy and replaced it with David's. That firm will make more money than their competition.

Maister gets a lot right: appeal to an employee's own needs, not the greater corporate good(more work, less support makes for a bad rallying cry); embrace a relationship mentality in business deverlopment not a transaction on(as he bluntly puts it, go for romance and not a one night stand although many talk the first but do the second); understand that all can be rainmakers if you speak to their needs and intererests first with the money a nice side benefit, a consequence and not a motivator. His chapter on law firms is disheartening.He says that they are so different from other PSFs that they need their own chapter. His analysis:"(law firms are made up of)bands of warlords,each with his or her followers,ruling over a group of cowed citizens and acting in temporary alliance---until a better opportunity comes along." Beacuse of billing pressures, he says many partners hoard the work that needs to be pressed down. A final point, and one I disagree with---he seems to suggest that PSFs must only cater to the elite clients and there is no room for commodity work. Yet it is the commodity work which trains newer employees and, at times, fills in the dry periods between the more margin filled engagements.

Although Maister is writing for and about professional services companies, I think his ideas about strategy apply to almost any type of business. The "Fat Smoker" analogy is memorable, and it means that we don't always do what we know is good for us, even when it comes to running a business. In order to achieve great results, we have to break the old habits that have kept us in the same old ruts. Most of the book concentrates on ways we can develop the right attitude toward our own work, interact more effectively with co-workers, and build inspired, cohesive organizations. For some people, this book will be like preaching to the converted. But for business leaders and professionals who think the individual is more important that the organization, or who lead by intimidation, it will be a challenging read. Although Maister has an easy to read style, there is nothing easy about his ideas. He shares great wisdom obviously the result of long years grappling with organizational problems at a high level.

David Maister's newest book, Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy, is a good one if not a cohesive one. Written in a very engaging style, packed with stories that illustrate the point, it is both an easy read and a thought-provoking collection. While it is not a seamless, chapter-building-on-chapter "how-to-do-it," it is full of individual sections that independently are brilliant. The first section alone (on strategy in general) has several great takeaways. Particularly if you are building a personal services company, this is a very handy resource.

This book is a collection of Maister articles. It's central message is that people often know *what* they should be doing, and even *how* to do it, but they often don't due to a lack of internal discipline.

Honestly, I preferred his other books "Managing the Professional Service Firm" and "The Trusted Advisor" over this one.

There are plenty of business books which contain inspiring and valuable ideas about excellent customer service, highly engaged employees, and strategies for creating remarkable success. The problem is that you almost never encounter organisations run the way recommended in such books. That is because it is easy to come up with a good strategy, but implementing a strategy is as hard as losing weight or giving up smoking, according to David Maister this book.

Maister shows particular insight into the difficulty of implementing strategy within a professional services firm such as a law firm. Lawyers are paid by their clients to be suspicious about the motives of other people and to consider the possible downsides to any transaction; it is therefore unsurprising that law firms have trouble in cultivating a climate of trust between managers and lawyers. Often this ends in failure to make any decisions, or at least a very slow and painful decision process.

I have read all of Maister's books, and in my view this one is the most useful to date. It is highly accurate in its identification of the range of strategy implementation problems encountered by professional services firms, and is filled with useful tactics for dealing with them. It is possible to have a highly profitable firm composed of competing warlords, but Maister's advice shows how to build a firm for the long term with engaged employees and happy clients.

I have been an avid follower of David Maister's for over 20 years and he keeps on chugging out gems. This latest work is no exception. Get it, read it, learn from it!

Knowing what we should do (strategy) is easy; doing it can sometimes be impossible.

If you're a fat smoker, especially if you have a history of heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other related health issues, your strategy is simple: lose weight and stop smoking.

However, it may take a near cataclysmic event to make us do what we know we need to do. Or it may depend on how much we want to do it.

For some organizations, as David explains in chapter 4, strategy is simply NOT possible! Just like many fat smokers, for whatever reasons, won't lose weight and stop smoking.

It's interesting how direct competitors often have nearly identical strategies. Knowing what they should do is easy. Doing it is hard, so whoever does the most of what they know they should be doing does the best.

David Maister is well known for his work with professional service firms, but his insights are applicable across business types. I haven't read his previous (and best selling) books, but I will!

Yes, David Maiser was a fat smoker. Me? I'm just fat.