Cartoons and Strategy

My son was being abnormally quiet the other day. Actually he was being quiet with periodic outbursts of laughter. This is not the normal state of affairs. For those of you with teenage boys you also probably know this to be the case. There is normally an ongoing chatter followed by screams of either anguish or happiness depending on who was most recently vanquished in the current on-line military game being played. I won’t mention which one. They all seem the same to me. We have all seen the commercials on television.

It was so odd to hear him in this mode that I did the unthinkable. I went upstairs to the game room to check on him. He wasn’t wearing his gaming headset. He wasn’t even on the internet. He was watching the Roadrunner and Coyote (more specifically Wile E. Coyote for those fellow purists like me) cartoons. I remembered watching these cartoons when I was young. It was amazing to me that they were still on. He had stumbled across them on a network that only played old cartoons; surprisingly enough called the “Classic Cartoon Network”.

Being of sound mind and body, a guy, and having cartoons on the television, I did the only logical thing. I went in, sat down and watched old cartoons with my son. Some of them I remembered and some I didn’t. It was fun to hang out with my son, but as usual, it got me to thinking. The humorous aspect of the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons was based on the simplicity of the task at hand; catching the Roadrunner, and the ever more complex slate of strategies employed by the Coyote in his attempts to complete the task.

Leave it to me to compare perfectly good classic cartoons to business. It’s an insult to the cartoons.

Sometimes his failures came from obvious, predictable and expected issues. Sometimes they came from unexpected directions. They were all entertaining. The Coyote’s single mindedness regarding catching the Roadrunner always made me smile.

I always wondered, if he could actually buy, build and fly his own ACME rocket, why didn’t he just use that same intelligence to order take-out from his favorite restaurant, or switch to chicken, which might have been an admirable substitute for Roadrunner and bought some at the grocery store? It probably would have saved him a great deal of wear and tear from all the falling off of cliffs and having large rocks fall on him.

Undaunted by each successive failure, the Coyote would generate a new strategy to capture the Roadrunner. Each new strategy would invariably contain maps and charts and plans on what to do and where to do it. Each new strategy was usually also more complex and more intricate than the last, but was guaranteed to work this time. They never did.

What Wile E. Coyote Inc. teaches us about strategy is something we all probably recognize but occasionally need to be reminded of: Simpler is better. This obviously applies to other business strategy as well.

A good strategy has only a few major attributes. I’ll try and go through at least my opinion of them, just as a refresher course.

First: The goal must be achievable.

On the surface one would think that catching a Roadrunner should be an attainable goal. It probably was, but it was how the Coyote went about it that was entertaining.

As a corollary it’s also okay to want to double or triple in size as a business. It may also on the surface appear to be an attainable goal but the question that should always be asked is: What is going to fundamentally change in the business that is going to enable, or even drive this kind of growth? Everybody else in the market wants to grow too, and they also have strategies. You need to have a very solid and strong precept that makes you different.

Second: The strategy must be simple.

Rube Goldberg is a name that is synonymous with creating very complex machines to achieve very simple goals. He also appears to have been the chief strategist for Coyote Inc. in its desire to overtake Roadrunner Inc. There is even an annual competition in his name where a simple task must be accomplished in no less than twenty different steps. The 2015 objective was to “shine a shoe”, and due to the complexity of some of the past entries (with over two hundred steps) the contest has been limited to a maximum of seventy five steps.

In business the goal should be to shine the shoe. Find the shoe, apply the polish and buff till the desired luster is achieved. That’s it. As the Coyote taught us, the more complex the strategy, the greater the chance there was for something to go wrong.

Third: No strategy survives contact with the real world intact.

This is a paraphrasing of the original quote:
“…no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.”
Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke (The Elder)

Now for those of you who are not up on your nineteenth century Prussian military history, Moltke was the Prussian military commander during the middle part of the century, and he wrote this in his book “On Strategy” in 1871.

Again we look to Coyote Inc. for examples of what not to do here. He would usually achieve one of the attributes he was striving for in his quest to get the Roadrunner. With the help of his trusty ACME rocket he could achieve the speed of the Roadrunner. He would close in only to see the Roadrunner demonstrate his ability to stop before running off a cliff, or turn sharply before running into a cliff. The Coyote with his ACME rocket usually would not be able to match this agility and maneuverability, with the (now) expected results.

The very act of implementing his strategy caused a change in the behavior of his target. Coyote Inc. was able to go as fast as Roadrunner Inc., so Roadrunner Inc. learned to stop or turn quickly in order to elude its pursuer. The same goes in business. Things change. The competition will react to competitive behavioral changes. Customers will do the same. You had better be able to learn how to change direction quickly.

The idea is to be ready for it. The simpler the strategy means there are fewer moving parts in it. The fewer the moving parts means the fewer number of things that can go wrong, which in turn means the fewer the number of things that will need to be modified as conditions in the market change. This is especially useful when it comes time to change direction because a cliff suddenly appears in front of you.

Keeping goals attainable, strategies and the number of contributing components simple, and preparing change direction as the conditions warrant seems to be enough for any business. It is the complexity that is introduced into the plan that is usually the cause of issues. When it comes to strategy and its components, I am a firm believer in the adage that “Less is more”.

It was an enjoyable time with my son watching old cartoons. It didn’t last nearly long enough. It seemed in no time he had his headset back on and was busy wiping out whichever opponent was on line at the time. I on the other hand was ready to impart all of these strategy and strategic insights that I had drawn from the Coyote’s obviously poor performance to him. He didn’t seem very interested.

I really didn’t expect him too, but still it was mildly disappointing after sharing a solid thirty minutes of quality time as we did. Still the cartoons stuck in my mind and the basic tenets about strategy were there. I suppose if Wile E. Coyote Inc. had actually employed the simple and straightforward strategies it should have in its quest to overtake Roadrunner Inc. the cartoons would have been much shorter, and probably not nearly as funny.

And I probably wouldn’t have gotten to spend some extra time with my son.