Why bother with strategy?

The following is a response I posted to a blog article titled "Four Reasons Why Productive People Hate Strategic Planning." The article riled me a bit and I couldn't help but post.

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Without a strategy, that is, a goal, how do you know you're not just wasting your time with make-work? The purpose of a strategy is to define the end goals and even some of the intermediate goals. It is not intended to lay out the minute detail of how to get there. Without strategy, you're just blundering about in the dark.

With a strategy, you should be able to answer questions like: "How do I know if I'm on track?", and "How will I know when I get there?" Like reading a street directory, you should be able to say things like "If I come across this intersection, I know I've gone too far but I can fix it by making the next two left turns."

Secondly, a strategy meeting must make decisions. That's the implication of the use of the word "plan." I'm betting that you've suffered too many strategic plans that make no decisions or make tactical, implementation decisions, or those decisions just haven't been visible to you.

Let's take a military example. A general defines a strategic battle plan, outlying broad but specific objectives. This gets broken down and along the line, a regimental commander is instructed to advance on a specific port and hold it to facilitate further landings. This gets further broken up and passed down the line, ending up with platoon commanders who meet the enemy and need to decide how to attack them. Ultimately, a section commander (a Corporal) is tasked with sneaking around onto an enemy's flank and attacking individual soldiers. To the corporals, the strategy is something that may be known but their concern is the soldiers immediately to their front. When you're pounding the ground, it's hard to see the far objective. I guess that's why generals sit up high in their ivory towers - so they can see the objective. The platoon leaders and section commanders have different objectives - take this enemy position and don't get hurt trying.

That's what strategy is about. By the way, I'm a pleb. Without strategy to guide me (or at least it guides my boss, who guides me), I'm just wasting my time and that stinks.

Photography - my new obsession

I got to the end of 2009 and realised my life revolved around computers - work, study, (ahem) free time.

So I needed a new hobby.

• Cycling - fun but not always portable.
• Keep fish - they were bound to die early, I don't think my landlord was really going to go for it, I'd forget to feed them or clean the tank enough, and I move home a bit too regularly.
• Get a pet - I rent OK...
• Photography - portable, can take ages or hardly any time at all, I drowned two Olympus SLRs 10 years ago but I'm smarter now, right?

So, one tax return later, new camera gear. And you know what, it doesn't cost as much to make bad photographs anymore. Digital is really great. So I thought I'd give a few impressions of my gear and my re-introduction to photography.

I bought a Canon 450D and Canon 17 - 85 mm kit lens just after Christmas from Ted's Camera.

I checked out about four shops in Melbourne and thought about buying online too. When I spoke to sales reps in the shops in the city, I was pushed towards Nikon gear - D5000 or D90. Having a look at the shop windows, I could have sworn there was a Nikon promotion on.

Second Hand Lenses

They looked pretty good and the market in second hand lenses looked strong (using eBay as the guide). One strength was that Nikon has kept the same mount since the 1970s so in theory, any lens would be compatible. Then I found an article about Nikon lens compatibility. On the D5000, only fairly recent lenses were going to be compatible. Canon, on the other hand had switched mounts when they introduced the EOS range in the mid-1980s and compatibility goes all the way back to then. So re-evaluating eBay, Canon came out on top. Probably not a major issue but I didn't want to cut myself out of part of the market - having a large range of second hand lenses to choose from enhances my ability to play around with gear (and spend less money doing so).

Design and Ergonomics

Secondly, when I held them, the 450D seemed to fit the hand better. The size of the grip and the positioning of the LCD screen off to the left helped with the fit. For someone with big hands, neither the D90 or D5000 seemed to be as comfortable. One nice feature of the D90 was the second dial for making adjustments to aperture, shutter speed, etc. Not that it's bad on the 450D, actually it's quite nice but maybe there are times when it's easier to reach the second dial.

I don't have to dig through menus very often to change settings. Even when I do need to access the menus, I usually only dig through one level (at most two) to get to what I want. Most of the settings I use regularly, I can add to a custom menu, which sadly is a bit too short. :(  (Am I being picky?)

Kit Lens

Yes, OK I could have spent less than I did and bought one of the cheaper kits. However, I'd read nothing good about the basic 18 - 55mm lenses that shipped with them. Plastic mount, lousy manual focus ring, lousy image quality. I also thought the twin kit was just going to be too much too soon (not having shot in 10 years).

The 17 - 85mm looked much better. A ring type USM motor, giving full time manual focus, a decent manual focus ring, metal mount and a bit more reach. Before I drowned my Olympus gear, I ended up settling with a 50mm f/1.8 and a 135mm f/2.8. The 17 - 85mm on the small sensor gives me the equivalent of about 24mm to 135mm so my old range was covered.

The only downside to this nice chunk of glass is that at 17mm it's not too hot. Zoom in a little and most of the problems go away.

All in all, it's a nice single lens kit (reportedly better than the Canon 18 - 200 kit option) and the IS makes up for some of the problems associated with the smaller maximum aperture (f/4 at 17mm, f/5.6 at 85mm).

File Formats

For an experiment, I tried shooting late into twilight recently in RAW + JPEG. Clearly, the RAW processing built into the camera is far superior to the JPEG processing. Areas of the JPEG that were burnt out or too dark, resolved detail in the RAW file. I wonder if a better camera would resolve JPEG files better.

My obsession

Well, this is quite a distraction from computing. I'm seeing the world differently and am looking for opportunities - often while driving my car. Seeing opportunities can be a challenge but I'm learning, again.

Cheers