We Danes love the down-to-earth. We like Egon Olsen more than Erasmus Montanus. But many companies must be careful that this attitude does not lead to strategy work being thrown out with the bathwater.

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"But he has no clothes on".

If Denmark were to have a slogan, the child's words from The Emperor's New Clothes would be a good idea. With the Jantelo law in hand and snuff in the back of our minds, we celebrate the down-to-earth.

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Whether it's the Olsen Gang's fight against the multinational financial frauds. Or the Crown Prince in running gear for the Royal Run - we love the immediacy and snigger at the Erasmus Montanus types.

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That's why it goes straight to the heart when Dennis Nørmark and Anders Fogh Jensen point to pseudo-work in Danish workplaces with thinly veiled sarcasm. Or when Morten Münster in "Jytte from Marketing" reveals with acid irony that abstract visions and strategies don't mean much in everyday life.

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ALSO READ Messy strategy by the little ones gives the big ones free rein

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Aren't we going to do some real work?

I myself am the first to turn a blind eye when simple points are turned into snobbish academic theory. For me, strategic professionalism is not long sentences, but the ability to cut to the chase.

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Nevertheless, I would like to warn our many small and medium-sized enterprises: be careful that the joy of the mundane does not lead to strategy work being abandoned.

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I still meet an astonishing number of managers who think strategy is a waste of time: "Shouldn't we be doing some real work - instead of fiddling with this pseudo-work?", they say.

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My answer is: Yes, if you know what the real work is.

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ALSO READ Taboo: Leaders who don't understand strategy

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This is particularly important to know at a time when business models can become obsolete in a morning and new opportunities are emerging at record speed.

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The ability to move in a timely manner has become crucial for the vast majority of businesses. It requires knowing where to move - and knowing where to come from.

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Out with the bathwater - keep the baby

So why this scepticism about strategy among many managers?

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Maybe because working on strategy can be a horrible experience if you do it wrong. Long slides, meetings and processes - filled with "sightings" and crumpled post-its. Not to mention lost working hours, the cost of strategy seminars and consultants.

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The fact is that much of it can be dropped. Because the trick to professional strategy work is that it's "just" a way to get down to the nitty-gritty: all the concrete actions that make a company achieve its goals and its people thrive.

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Sometimes I use the car holiday south as an example.

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It can feel liberating to ditch a specific destination and route planning, and just get in the car and drive south - solving problems along the way. But when you hit the crowded ferry, the hour-long "traffic jam" and the kids screaming in the back seat, most people probably wish the trip had been better planned from the start.

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Vacation types are a matter of taste, but data from the Center for Owner-Managed Enterprises is not. Among other things, they show that companies that work purposefully with strategy have on average 100 percent higher profits and 280 percent higher growth than companies that do not work purposefully with strategy.

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It's good to remember the next time your strategic manager ditches strategy work in favour of "real work".

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This column was published on Jyllands-Posten Finance and in Jyllands-Posten, Erhverv on 20 June 2022.

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