3.8 STRATEGY'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

    Gary Hamel wrote in a 1997 Fortune cover story that the "dirty little secret" of the strategy industry, of which he is a leading practitioner, is that it "doesn't have any theory of strategy creation." The truly innovative strategies, he says, "are always, and I mean always, the result of lucky foresight." Digital strategy is a radical new approach to strategic planning, one that doesn't pretend to create strategies so much as to create an environment where lucky foresight is more likely to make an appearance. It shares few features with traditional strategy development and deployment techniques. It values creativity and intuition. Its development is not the task of a few individuals, but of an entire organization, communicating on as open and wide a channel as technology will permit. Most of all, it recognizes technology not as a tool for implementing a static strategy but as a constant disrupter creating both threats and opportunities that wide-awake organizations can turn into killer apps for their own benefit.

    The techniques of digital strategy are being developed by companies around the world today as they experiment with digital technologies and attempt to let loose their own killer apps. From our participation in these efforts, and from studying both winning and losing examples, we have gleaned a few rules of thumb that can help you develop a digital strategy of your own. These rules are the subject of Part 2.