Objectives aren't going to take motor retail forward - Saker's opinion

Regular contributor professor Jim Saker, director of the Centre for Automotive Management at Loughborough University and president of the Institute of the Motor Industry, muses on motor retailers' need to spend as much time on communicating strategy as they do communicating objectives in his monthly article for AM.

It's not often that I make reference to Formula 1 but as the 2022 season drew to an end a number of changes in Team Principal started to be made. Perhaps the most interesting was Mattia Binotto’s exit from Ferrari.

Ferrari had a good car and good drivers, but they failed to beat Red Bull. Undoubtedly the cars between the two organisations were comparable and there was not much between the drivers.

The difference was in the approach to strategy.

For over twenty years I taught strategy at the Institute of Directors and had the privilege of having both the Head of MI5 and the Counter Terrorism Commander for the Met Police in my classes along side leading people from a range of businesses.

Getting strategy right is essential for success in both motor racing and national security. The essential elements for any strategy are the quality of the information/intelligence you have and the ability to communicate it effectively into action.

If you looked at Ferrari throughout the F1 season they seemed to lack a coherent race strategy. Red Bull by comparison seemed to have a well informed and structured approach to each race.

One of the personalities to emerge from the Red Bull pit wall was Hannah Schmitz the Principal Strategy Engineer.

A Cambridge engineering graduate, Schmitz came to prominence with her winning call at the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix when after a late safety car, she pitted Max Verstappen from the leading position who then went straight past Lewis Hamilton to take the win.

In 2022 she was recognised as being responsible for playing a crucial role in Red Bull winning the F1 championship with her decisions out manoeuvring those of Ferrari and Mercedes.

The ability to assimilate data, make decisions based on that data and then calmly communicate the strategy is fundamental. A quote that I particularly like was one she made to Sky Sports;

“As a strategist you have to tell a lot of people what to do and they’ve got to listen to you, so it’s building up that trust and I think as a woman unfortunately that was harder, but now I have that respect and I hope other young women who want to get into the sport will see that you can do it, can embrace it, and we’ll see more diversity.”

One of the challenges that our industry faces is in finding great strategists.

Everyone in F1 knows what the objective is but most don’t have the strategy to achieve it. The same applies in our sector, we know the objectives that are set but there is confusion as to the right strategy to achieve them.

People from different backgrounds view the world through different lenses and maybe its time to embrace different perspectives in the attempt to come up with creative and better-informed strategies to take our industry forward.