There’s nothing spookier than adopting someone else’s plan for your customers. That’s exactly what the technology hype machine wants you to do.

If you’ve got a business need, someone’s got a new method or technology shortcut to sell you. Especially if you’re under pressure, and if failure cannot be tolerated. Again. In this economy. Ugh…

Red status stains your slide

Another meeting barely survived

Your OpEx projections an awful sight

All lines trend down and to the right

Squirming in existential fear

You punted delivery another year

You feel your boss’s boss surmising

It’s you they’ll be downsizing

You rush to stay employed

Need something quick to fill the void

For leaders you’ve placated

With strategy you’ve abdicated

A turn-key grasp for market share

And you’ll pay any price

For no mere mortal can resist

The allure of the Strategeist

(Thank you, Vincent Price!)

Zeitgeist is the German term for “time-spirit” or the “spirit of the times”, a popular, temporarily-powerful belief that motivates the thought and action of an era. While there are bucketloads of examples throughout history, here’s a societal, a national, and a fashion example:

• Western society in the 1920s. Finally unshackled from centuries of tradition, the post-WWI West brimmed with optimism, fueling overnight prosperity and cultural experimentation…until it all failed to remake a sustainable world and society blue screened. It rebooted again…in 1945.
• The US in the 1990s. The “End of History”. The golden hour capping a golden age and the apotheosis of Pax Americana. 1990s America celebrated the decades of effort and growth that preceded it with a great, satisfying sit in our nation-sized recliner, flicking on the new RCA to gaze proudly upon life’s good work: functioning institutions, incredible material wealth, and rapidly-advancing technology. Sure, there was a looming sense that things might be unraveling…but not here or now. Not when Dawson’s Creek was on.
• Ugg boots. In 2007, shawty had them apple bottom jeans (jeans) and the boots with the fur (with the fur). The whole club was lookin' at her…Uggs.

Entire populations can get caught up in what seems and feels obvious, sauntering with the herd into some perceived inevitability.

Modern business executives find themselves haunted by a different geist, the Strategeist: the fad-like “business strategy of the times”. The Strategeist manifests as someone else’s methodology or tool pitched as an answer to your business’s complex strategic needs like growth, profitability, or continuity.

We reach for the Strategeist (or rather, it reaches for us) in the absence of genuine strategy. When the Strategeist occupies that space, it corrupts your best intentions and cuckolds your smartest ideas. It senses your hunger for answers, feasts on your action bias, and preys doubly upon your desire not to see competitors succeed. Few businesspeople expect to lose customers, but equally few can bear the anguish of seeing someone else win. Just a short list of examples:

• Management
  • Operating methods
    • MBO
    • 4DX
    • EOS
    • Lean
    • Six Sigma
    • Hustle/grind
  • Innovation disciplines
    • Design Thinking
    • Strategyzer
    • Growth hacking
  • Circular strategy
    • Offshoring/onshoring/reshoring
    • Delayering/relayering
    • RTO/open office/hybrid/full remote
  • Certifications independent of talent or experience
    • Agile/Scrum
    • AI, machine learning, other emerging tech
  • Geopolitics
    • Malthusianism
    • Peak oil
  • Agriculture
    • Satellite imagery
    • Bugs in a jug
  • Manufacturing
    • Total automation
    • Humanoid robots
  • Tech (just in the past 4 years…)
    • Blockchain
    • Cryptocurrency
    • Self-driving cars
    • Automated everything
    • Predictive anything
    • 5G
    • Green tech
    • VR
    • Quantum computing
    • Generative AI

“Oh, it’s coming,” advocates and acolytes retort. Yes, it always seems to be. The omnipresent, ever-persistent threat of manifestation. Like a ghost, perhaps?

Strategeists are puffs of smoke that build on our preconceptions, blurring perception and reality. They limit our capacity for both insight and action. Our desire to have them work makes them real, until they fail.

None are exactly what non-experts perceive them to be. Unlike products, services, or ideologies that unambiguously solve real, definable problems, Strategeists solve problems with grandiosity, promising to invalidate swathes of intractable issues with but a hand wave. And they’ll make you Silicon Valley rich along the way if only you just believe.

Note, however, that like many spirit possessions, there’s an upside to a Strategeist infatuation: institutions can easily dodge accountability for success or failure while looking extremely busy. “We’ll fall behind.” “It’s what the market demanded.” “Everyone else was doing it.” “The tech just didn’t take.” The Strategeist utters many cliches to survive. Strategiests enable entrenched bureaucracies that need to act but cannot ever be held accountable.

When you’re unclear on where you stand, external opinions carry far more weight than they have a right to, and dazzling promises draw you in based on what you hope they fulfill. However, when things are going well, the last instinct you have is to listen to someone else. To bust geists, strike a balance between both instincts with your proton pack of awareness, self-assuredness, action, and time.

Awareness

No matter how compelling an idea seems, greet it skeptically and treat it like a fad simply to depressurize it. You’re on to its tricks! Both mass and social media produce anxiety as a byproduct of information transmission. Articles quantifying the retirement savings you’re supposed to have at your age spur anxious curiosity to get your click for those sweet ad bucks. Similarly, Silicon Valley increasingly relies on hype in lieu of self-evident value, aiming to sell you their answer as a quick fix to your problem.

Self-assuredness

When you reduce the anxiety generated by external pressure, you create space. Empty space will cause anxiety if left empty, so fill it with relevant intelligence. Customer contact creates confidence, just as its absence breeds the very uncertainty the Strategeist preys upon. It’s OK to act measuredly—your competition won’t steal your market share by implementing someone else’s commodity tech.

Action

Without that unnecessary anxiety clouding your strategic plans, you can explore new options more rationally. If you need a boost of intelligence or assuredness, external validation testing will deliver. Ask a few users about preference, “hey, blockchain tech would add X and Y to this, what do you think?”. Then, collect analogous behavioral data. All the hype fueling Strategeist-y ideas means that someone else probably created what you’re considering. Use it! Is it really any good?

Time

Simultaneously the Strategeist’s strongest weapon (act fast!) and its mortal foe. You can make a product leveraging new technology quickly, but making a new product worthwhile takes time. Some ideas take centuries to find their niche. Your crackpot uncle isn’t broadcasting his politics on Six Degrees. Despite the hype, better still beats faster.

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When there's something weird in your tech strategy, who you gonna call? Next Mile! We ain’t afraid of no geist.

PS There’s a video game named Strategeist wherein you build the will of a nation. Could be interesting!