Bryant Graves - How strategy could/should or doesn't apply to your job. The future of business strategy and consulting - S3 Ep10
Brain-hurt scale = 8/10. Strategy has become such a buzzword these days. More often, just a prefix added to job titles to make it sound more attractive, not whether the job requires real strategy acumen or not. Everyone seems to be acting 'strategic'. But what does that even mean? Who better to unpack all these questions than someone who just finished working for one of the largest companies in the world. Today we’re talking to Bryant Graves. Ex-senior strategy manager at Walmart, now in charge of Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy at Snowflake. Back in Season 2 we spoke with Karim from Cascade which gave us a great overview on the modern state of Strategy. So listen to that first if you haven't already done so. In this episode, we needed to dig a little deeper into the business strategy weeds. Bryant has worked for VC firms, for consulting firms, for Ancestry, one of the world’s largest retailers (Walmart) and now one of the most profitable software firms in the world (Snowflake). With such breadth of exposure across all business functions, different-sized firms, different sectors, he’s the perfect person to help us unpack some of the curly questions we had. What is real strategy, what isn't strategy? Is it just a vision or mission statement? What are the different layers? From corporate to business, operational and functional - and how do they apply to our role? What are the hallmarks of a good strategy person vs an junior? How can you use some of these principles to determine which companies are good or bad when looking for a new job? Why is the traditional management consulting sourced strategy function waning and what’s replacing it? Why does a lot of strategy fail when it comes to implementation? Is strategy a few people in a board room meeting once a financial year - or is it more dynamic and changeable? What tools should we be using? PowerPoint and Excel? What caused Instagram to rip apart their whole organizational structure and rebuild it in just 3 months to respond to a competitive threat. What should we be measuring and how? Waterfall or agile - which is better? What core part of the business do people overlook when mistaking Walmart for a pure retailer? Get a Boba-tea, and press play