This continues until Noah’s last call, “thinkers: those who think before they react to everything that comes there way.” Would anyone in your office get on? Or would they be too busy checking the Facebook page of that Noah guy?

With an avalanche of information and data at our fingertips, it’s easy to succumb to the waves of reactivity. Much of it is well intentioned. We want to be good team players. We want to support the needs of our colleagues. We want to be responsive to customers. Unfortunately, all that good intention is often laced with a lack of discipline, turning our days into a series of firefighting, aimless action and off-task wastes of time.

A recent study published in the Harvard Business Review showed that the more workers switched tasks during the day in a reactive manner, the less they accomplished. Workers that had double the number of task switches (email to phone, phone to report, report to meeting, etc.) were a whopping 9 times less productive then their counterparts. Multi-tasking may make you feel like you’re getting more done, but research shows that’s a comfortable delusion.

There are three ways to increase your effectiveness and efficiency when it comes to thinking before reacting:

1.  Individual Think Time. You’re busy. Really busy. No time to think. It’s the most common challenge I hear in strategy workshops. But the great leaders don’t find time to think. They create it. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner recently wrote, “If you were to see my calendar, you’d probably notice a host of time slots greyed out but with no indication of what’s going on. There is no problem with my Outlook or printer. The grey sections reflect ‘buffers,’ or time periods I’ve purposely kept clear of meetings. In aggregate, I schedule between 90 minutes and two hours of these buffers every day. Over time, I realized not only were these breaks important, they were absolutely necessary in order for me to do my job.”

Notice he doesn’t consider individual think time as a “nice-to-have.” He says think time is “…absolutely necessary in order for me to do my job.” You may be thinking, “Sure, that’s easy for the CEO, because, after all, he’s the CEO. But that would never fly for me in my company.” Well it should as long as you don’t work for a buffoon. But for those of you that still aren’t sure, start small. Schedule 15 minutes after lunch on Friday to sit with a pen and notebook or tablet computer and start jotting down ideas about your business: What’s worked well recently? Why? How is your competition changing? What strengths should you be using more in your job? What should you stop doing because it’s no longer bringing value? What does your “not-to-do” list have on it?

2.  Team Think Time. Let’s play a word association game. I say “up,” you say, “down.” I say, “reality TV,” you say, “morons.” I say, “morons,” you say, “Congress.” You get the idea. I say, “strategic planning,” you’d say what? Some of the responses I’ve heard are: time-consuming, annual, PowerPoint decks, well intentioned, and not used.

One reason the term strategic planning has a lot of baggage is because it’s often poorly done. It shouldn’t be an annual dog-and-pony show preceded by weeks and weeks of work only to be filed away until next year. Strategy should be an ongoing conversation, not an event. Engage people in dynamic discussions of your key business issues framed by the appropriate questions and tools and you’ve immediately elevated the experience. Instead of a tactical, in-the-the weeds complaint-fest, you transform it into a real-time thinking session where the focus is on people’s ideas, not a slide deck.

Once again, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner shares his thoughts on team think time: “Thinking, if done properly, requires uninterrupted focus; thoroughly developing and questioning assumptions; synthesizing all of the data, info and knowledge that’s incessantly coming your way; connecting dots, bouncing ideas off of trusted colleagues. In other words, it takes time. And that time will only be available if you carve it out. Conversely, if you don’t take the time to think proactively you will increasingly find yourself reacting to your environment rather than influencing it. The resulting situation will inevitably require far more time (and meetings) than thinking strategically would have to begin with.”

3.  “Let’s think about that.”It’s a simple but powerful phrase that can change your business and culture. The next time you receive an email marked urgent or someone comes charging into your office with how to react to a competitor’s activity or a new flavor-of-the-month project, reply with “Let’s think about that.” Then stop and consider how this helps you achieve your goals and supports your strategic focus. To do so, determine the probability of success, impact on the business and resources required. If after this analysis, it doesn’t appear to support your goals and strategies, kindly inform folks that relative to the other initiatives you’re working on, this doesn’t warrant resource allocation.

Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion states: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In your business, thoughtless reaction may cost you a few seemingly harmless hours, or it may eventually lead to people losing their jobs. Heed Horwath’s First (and most likely my last) Law of Strategic Motion: “For every needless reaction, there is someone who failed to think.”

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1. Cultivating strategic thinking

2. Finding or developing technical skills

3. Finding or developing more business insight

4. Converting technologists to strategists

The title of the study “In Search of Strategists” says it all. If an IT manager does not have the ability to think strategically about their work and the work of their team, they simply aren’t realizing their true level of potential value. Strategic thinking is about generating insights that lead to competitive advantage. IT managers are in the envious position of leading the management of data and information, which gives them the perfect opportunity to identify insights. After all, an insight is when you’re able to combine two or pieces of unrelated data or information in a unique way to create new value for internal or external customers. Failing to train IT managers on strategic thinking means failing to capitalize on insights which could make or break the business.

For most companies, understanding how technology aids their strategy is critical to success. But, simply creating a “Technology Strategy Roadmap” misses the big picture. As with any sound business strategy, IT needs to develop solutions that create new value for customers. Those customers might be internal employees or external in the marketplace. Either way, technology strategy is a part of the overall strategy to deliver new and differentiated value. Integrating IT managers with leaders from other functional areas such as operations, marketing, finance, sales and HR is the only way to ensure a strategy dialogue is leading to a unified strategic direction. Otherwise, you’ve got nothing more than a ham radio fest on your hands.

Business strategy is defined as the intelligent allocation of limited resources through a unique system of activities to outperform the competition in serving customers. Nestled in the middle of the definition, this idea of differentiation is perhaps the most overlooked tenet of strategy. Differentiation for competitive advantage in business has its roots in science.

In 1934, Moscow University professor G. F. Gause published the results of a landmark study. He placed small animals in a bottle with an ample amount of food. If the animals were of the same genus and a different species, they were able to live together peaceably. However, if the animals were of the same genus and the same species, they were not able to coexist. This led to the Principle of Competitive Exclusion, which states the following: “No two species can coexist that make their living in the identical way.”

Makes sense when we think about two male lions in the plains of Africa. After a while, one will be defeated and leave. Also makes sense in business. If two companies are doing the same things in the same ways and producing very similar products and services, after a while, one of them will be lunch. Think Barnes & Noble and Borders–Borders bankrupt. Think Best Buy and Circuit City–Circuit City bankrupt. The list goes on.

We’re so busy trying to be “better” than the competition, we fail to realize there is no “better.” Better is subjective. Is blueberry pie better than banana cream? Depends who you ask. But we know blueberry pie is different because it has blueberries, which have antioxidants, which are good for you, etc. It’s not about better. It’s about how are you different in ways that customers value? Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos describes his company’s approach to competitive differentiation: ”You want to look at what other companies are doing. It’s very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don’t want to look at it as if, ‘Okay, we’re going to copy that.’ You want to look at it and say, ‘That’s very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?’ And then put your own unique twist on it.”

Consider your company. How different are the activities you’re performing from the competition? How different are your products and services? What’s that rumbling noise? Might just be your competitor’s stomach.

“Help Wanted: Looking for a Professional Template Filler-Outer. Lots of experience required. Good pay. No thinking necessary.”

While the job posting is imaginary, the job itself is not. In organizations around the world, millions of hours are spent filling out templates: business plans, marketing plans, sales plans and strategic plans, to name just a few. People are becoming highly skilled at filling up slide decks with information: market data, sales numbers, customer revenues, etc.

Never have so many presentations said so little.

I recently reviewed a strategic plan developed by a regional director that didn’t actually contain a strategy. Honest. I even double-checked. The word “strategy” wasn’t used once.

As managers struggle with growing to-do lists, the real purpose of business planning is often lost. The goal of business planning is to create direction for resource allocation and activities that drive the business. But, too often it deteriorates into a cumbersome, check-the-box process filled with useless templates. Then, it sits idle in a file on the computer until the next dog-and-pony show, I mean, business plan review. As Biogen CEO George Scangos said, “When process becomes more important than content, the company is dead, right?”

What’s been lost in the process, or in some cases has never existed, is the ability to think strategically about the business to generate insights that lead to new value for customers. The 2013 HR Benchmarks Trend book produced by the Society for Human Resource Management cites research showing that the #1 skill job applicants lack is strategic thinking.

There’s a big difference between teaching your people how to fill out templates and teaching them the skills to think strategically about their business. Templates are only useful if they are filled with insights, not information. Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez sums it up: “People often think that failure is the result of poor execution rather than poor strategy. But sometimes people are just trying to execute against the wrong plan.”

There are three steps you can take to move from a check-the-box process to a strategic thinking approach:

1. Stimulate new thinking.The reason most plans are nothing more than a compilation of last year’s updated goals and tactics is because no new thinking takes place. Identify and select questions, tools and frameworks to productively facilitate thinking and dialogue about the key business issues. Then visually capture the important insights from the discussion using the appropriate strategic thinking tools.

2. Trade bullets for stories. While bullet points offer the quickest route through the template forest, they can leave out critical components in the crafting of the strategic direction. Requiring managers to develop a fuller narrative of their strategy will yield a much deeper understanding of the “how’s” and “why’s” so often neglected by bullet points alone. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Fortune magazine 2012 Businessperson of the Year, says, “Full sentences are harder to write. They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”

3. Use templates to share insights. Templates inherently aren’t evil. It’s their misuse and overuse that have given them a bad reputation. Selecting a handful of templates that effectively communicate insights regarding important business issues is a part of planning. Accompanying each template should be a brief summary of the key insights drawn from that template. If you have templates in your plan that don’t produce a “so what?” or “take-away,” then pull them out. As former Intel CEO Andy Grove said, “The model doesn’t tell you what the answer is. But it gave us a common language and a common way to frame the problem, so that we could reach consensus around a counterintuitive course of action.”

If you find yourself trapped in a check-the-box process overflowing with useless templates and little insight, you’re not alone. But, it’s not too late to change things for the better. Here’s your prescription: more thinking + fewer templates = better business.

Since many strategic plans are nothing more than budget-driven, out-of-touch, unused slide decks with the relevance of a Sear’s catalogue, leaving them on a plane isn’t a bad idea. But, any manager that believes “it’s all about execution,” should be kicked off that plane at the comfortable cruising altitude of 32,000 feet. You can have the most technologically advanced aircraft flown by a competent pilot (execution), but if the plane’s flight plan (strategy) has it running into a mountain range, great execution only helps you crash faster.

Has your business changed much in the past year? Compare your strategic plan from the previous year to this year’s plan. How much difference in strategy, resource allocation and insights do you see? Not much. Why? Most likely because there wasn’t any new thinking involved in the creation and evolution of the plan throughout the year.

Great strategy doesn’t come from a company, division, business unit or functional group. Great strategy comes from great thinkers–managers who generate new insights, anticipate customer needs, and execute effectively. When is the last time you devoted 60 minutes to pure thinking about your business?

So how do you go about thinking more effectively and more regularly? There are three steps:

 1. Schedule. You’re busy. I’m busy. We’re all busy doing stuff. Problem is, some of the stuff we’re doing doesn’t make much sense and adds no value. The first step is not putting think time in the calendar. The first step is assessing the areas and amount of time you currently spend. Take the least valuable activities on the list and cut those time investments by 50-100%. Then, the most common excuse I hear, “I don’t have any time to think strategically,” is no longer true. Now, put time in your calendar on a weekly basis for thinking and label it whatever makes sense for you.

2. Frame. Think time is not code for fuzzy slippers, white wine and Kenny G music in the background, although now you have a plan for Friday night. Think time is most productive when you have questions and frameworks to stimulate your thinking, whether it be individually or in a group. If you facilitate meetings/teleconferences and you don’t have productive thinking frameworks to guide your session, there’s a good chance people believe you’re wasting their time. And they’re probably right. There are more than 40 strategic thinking tools you can use individually or in a group to stimulate and frame thinking about your business.

3. Record. In research for my past few books, I noticed that one of the common traits of the great contributors throughout history (da Vinci, Einstein, Gates) was the discipline to write down their ideas. Writing down your ideas and then reviewing them over time gives you the advantage of being able to see patterns and trends that others don’t. It’s impossible to connect the dots (insights) if you don’t have any dots to connect.

Chances are somebody in your market is investing time to think about the business. Is it you, or the competition?

Having reviewed hundreds of strategic plans from both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, one of the most glaring omissions is a clear and concise list of the trade-offs being made. If the strategic plan contains creditable strategies (I say ‘if’ because I’ve read strategic plans that didn’t actually list a strategy), then the trade-offs should be apparent. Too often, the strategies are generic, cover-all-your-bases, consensus-driven statements that are more descriptive of goals (what you’re trying to achieve) rather than a clear, concise method of how the goals will be achieved. If the strategies in the strategic plan more closely resemble a lengthy To-Do list, it’s a sign that trade-offs haven’t been made. If trade-offs haven’t been made, you have no chance–zero–of attaining any type of competitive advantage.

Three questions can start your thinking about trade-offs:

1. Which potential customers are you choosing not to serve?

2. What potential product/service offerings are you choosing not to provide?

3. Which trade-off factors (quality, service, convenience, selection, experience, price) are you able to provide the most differentiated value to your targeted customers?

Trade-offs are difficult to make. So, many managers don’t make them. Do you?

Without competitive differentiation, a business relies on relationships and price to win the day. But both of these are often trumped by differentiation that customers value. Case-in-point: Nokia. Once the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, they gave away their lead. While it’s easy to assume they failed to keep up with technology, this is not the case. They actually developed a phone with color touch screen seven years before Apple introduced the iPhone. Unfortunately, they lacked the discipline to transform the product into a strategic advantage that drove differentiated value. Nokia EVP Jo Harlow admitted, “Our focus has been on getting to market, as opposed to lots of differentiation.”

Unfortunately, not having “lots of differentiation” usually means not having lots of profits. A study of 108 business launches by companies showed that 86 percent were merely line extensions, which only accounted for 39 percent of profits. However, the 14 percent of business launches that brought differentiated value to customers accounted for a whopping 61 percent of profits.

This ability of a manager to create differentiation customers value is a subset of the skill of strategic thinking. In announcing the hiring of an outsider to run their critically important consumer business, Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky said, “Sandi Peterson is an experienced global leader known for her strategic thinking and proven track record in growing businesses.” Since the number one priority for CEOs is business growth (Conference Board Study, April 2011), it makes sense that J&J would want a strategic thinker, someone skilled at generating insights that lead to new value for customers and new profits for the company.

Whether it’s products, services, or people, strategic thinking drives the differentiation that matters. The question for you: Is your team strategic enough to win the day?