Key contributors to success and failure for leaders in navigating diverse and changing strategic environments

Your Strategy NeedsIn their recently published book, Your Strategy Needs a Strategy: How to Choose and Execute the Right Approach, published by Harvard Business Review Press (2015), Martin Reeves, Knut Haanaes, and Janmejava Sinha offer these key contributors to success and failure for leaders when navigating diverse and changing strategic environments:

Tips

o Embrace complexity: Introduce complexity in your organization where this will improve the match between environment and strategy without incurring excessive coordination costs.

o Explain simply: The resulting strategic collage may be confusing to workers and investors; find the common thread to communicate a clear story.

o Look outward: Use your unique position to counteract the self-reinforcing tendencies of your organization to perpetuate dominant beliefs by keeping the organization externally focus and fluid.

o When in doubt, disrupt: Organizations naturally become entrenched in their established ways of doing things. In a dynamic world, an overemphasis on continuity is a larger danger than unnecessary disruption.

Traps

o Managing instead of leading: Getting too deeply involved in managing each approach can prevent you from shaping the strategy collage at a higher level, as encapsulated in the eight roles of leaders (i.e. diagnostician, segmenter, disrupter, team coach, salesperson, inquisitor, antenna, and accelerator).

o Planning the unplannable: In a world that changes quickly and unpredictably, overinvesting in precise predictions and plans can backfire. An effective leader recognizes that sometimes plans are [begin] not [end] the sign of good leadership.

o Rigidity: Some leaders select an approach but are unwilling to change as new information arises, even though the original course will likely not survive the tides of change.

I also suggest that you think about these thoughts about effective leadership by Jim Collins:

“I think humility is a good start. I think we got to a point where people thought that if you wanted to be a leader, you had to be arrogant. No. First, leadership is about hope, leadership is about change, and leadership is about the future. And if you start with those three premises, I want leaders who are willing to listen because the future is not clear. People can tell you about the past because there’s certainty about the past. With the future, there’s not much certainty, so you have to listen, and bring in multiple perspectives.

“Let me use a metaphor. I look at good leaders like sheepdogs. Good sheepdogs have to follow three rules. Number one, you can bark a lot, but you don’t bite. Number two, you have to be behind; you cannot be ahead of the sheep. Number three, you must know where to go, and you mustn’t lose the sheep.”

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