How to resolve AdBlock issue? Natasha Mandie shows how to bring your strategic A-game to high-stakes decisions
By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>
IN AN AGE of difficult decision making, how can businesses develop strategy?
Natasha Mandie, founder and managing director of EM Advisory, who has almost 30 years experience in corporate advisory and investment banking, brings a practical and commercially grounded perspective on strategic decision-making. She offers valuable insights into how business leaders can make better decisions when the stakes are highest.
Ms Mandie said strategy for companies was about defining ‘why’ the company is doing what it does. What’s their purpose? Why were they set up?
This boils down to three points.
“One is what is your wish, what is your purpose, why do you exist, what are you trying to achieve?” Ms Mandie told Talking Business. 
“Then, what does the market need? What customer itch are you scratching? What are you trying to define? What are you trying to address?
“And then, what can you do?
“So that combination of what do you want to do? Does the market need you to do it? And can you practically deliver against that?
“If you can make those three things align, that’s where you see the highest level of business performance.”
Taking the objectives on board
They key, Ms Mandie said, was to cascade this through the teams so they become the team’s objectives.
“The more people understand at a higher level the business is doing something, the more they can be sure that even if market conditions change, and customers change how they behave, they can then adjust and evolve their plans,” she said.
Ms Mandie said leadership and communication were critical to ensure that everyone was on the same bus together.
“A lot of people think strategy planning is a leadership activity and it’s imposed on the business,” Ms Mandie said.
“I have a fundamentally different view.
“The more you can involve the whole team in both the setting of the original direction and then all the planning that cascades through it, and there’ll be different levels at which people are involved depending on the size of the business, bit they must understand what came before them, they must understand the overall objective.
“Because otherwise, they might misunderstand their goal and take the whole process om an expensive and unproductive tangent,” she said.
“This sort of planning and planning style is all about communicating with your team and making sure they understand where their activity fits in with the overall plan.”
With military precision
Ms Mandie said this comes from military planning and military history.
“So the idea that in a battlefield sense, everyone has to understand the overall objective and that’s cascaded into the specific activities for the different parts of the military force and that military force needs to understand where they fit in,” she said.
“The more you can communicate that, the more you can inspire people to believe in that purpose, then the more likely that their effort will be aligned and help progress the goal rather than not.”
Ms Mandie said business leaders needed to convey this distinctly. It has to be simple and understood by everyone.
“To distil a goal into a simple concept -- and if people understand how their role fits within that…they do have to believe in that.” she said.
“It’s actually so important that people believe in their work and as humans we have purpose and we believe in the activities that we’re doing, that we understand why they’re important because those things feed our souls and we generally work better, are happier and more productive and more understanding we’re we fit.
“A lot of business boil things down to tasks: Go and do X.
“Now it’s clear and simple. The challenge with it is it doesn’t align people and it doesn’t make them feel part of a team,” Ms Mandie said. 
“If you’ve got two groups of people – one that is fulfilling tasks and one that understands where their tasks fit within the overall goal – that second team, where there is alignment, they’re going to be a lot more effective.”
Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness
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