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Strategy as Leadership: Facing Adaptive Challenges in Organizations
Why do so many strategic plans fail? Despite hours of organizational analysis, market research, competitive assessments, and numerical scenario building, management teams express high rates of dissatisfaction with the level of strategy implementation.
Strategy as Leadership proposes that high dissatisfaction rates with the outcome of strategic planning exercises often hide an essential a failure to recognize that beyond being a technical exercise, strategic planning is a leadership intervention designed to mobilize the organization to meet new competitive challenges.
The authors suggest the existence of a strong correlation between the failure of strategic initiatives and those organizations having ignored the dark side of what they call the "hidden P&L" - priorities and losses. Moving ahead on big new priorities inevitably generates some parts of the organization, some people, some functions, some values, and some traditions will be downgraded or even abandoned in the name of progress. Corporations trying to implement strategic initiatives typically trumpet the benefits and ignore the losses, treating implementation as a piece of technical work. Doing so is a comfortable default. No one gets hurt, and nothing gets left behind.
Therefore, to be successful in moving forward, the senior management team must identify, understand, and consider the losses the organization will face in pursuit of its new priorities. At its best, strategic planning involves orderly and informed conversations about the organization's future, generating an agreement which produces a plan reflecting new priorities or reordering of old ones. However, reordering priorities inherently generates losses as some old ones are downgraded or abandoned. It follows that to be effectively implemented, a strategic planning process must take those potential losses into account in establishing priorities.
Roberto S. Vassolo and Natalia Weisz provide a framework to anticipate drastic competitive changes, address and respond to them by identifying both the reasonable priorities and the inner tensions these changes generate, and provide guidance for their successful navigation. Their outside-in approach specifies the salient leadership challenges that executives will face while mobilizing their organizations to respond effectively to competitive and environmental change.
Drawing on decades of research and consulting experience, the authors offer insightful and actionable advice on how to develop effective strategic plans and increase the likelihood of successful implementation. Their guidance is both comprehensive and practical, providing valuable insights for organizations looking to improve their strategic planning processes and achieve their goals.
Strategy as Leadership proposes that high dissatisfaction rates with the outcome of strategic planning exercises often hide an essential a failure to recognize that beyond being a technical exercise, strategic planning is a leadership intervention designed to mobilize the organization to meet new competitive challenges.
The authors suggest the existence of a strong correlation between the failure of strategic initiatives and those organizations having ignored the dark side of what they call the "hidden P&L" - priorities and losses. Moving ahead on big new priorities inevitably generates some parts of the organization, some people, some functions, some values, and some traditions will be downgraded or even abandoned in the name of progress. Corporations trying to implement strategic initiatives typically trumpet the benefits and ignore the losses, treating implementation as a piece of technical work. Doing so is a comfortable default. No one gets hurt, and nothing gets left behind.
Therefore, to be successful in moving forward, the senior management team must identify, understand, and consider the losses the organization will face in pursuit of its new priorities. At its best, strategic planning involves orderly and informed conversations about the organization's future, generating an agreement which produces a plan reflecting new priorities or reordering of old ones. However, reordering priorities inherently generates losses as some old ones are downgraded or abandoned. It follows that to be effectively implemented, a strategic planning process must take those potential losses into account in establishing priorities.
Roberto S. Vassolo and Natalia Weisz provide a framework to anticipate drastic competitive changes, address and respond to them by identifying both the reasonable priorities and the inner tensions these changes generate, and provide guidance for their successful navigation. Their outside-in approach specifies the salient leadership challenges that executives will face while mobilizing their organizations to respond effectively to competitive and environmental change.
Drawing on decades of research and consulting experience, the authors offer insightful and actionable advice on how to develop effective strategic plans and increase the likelihood of successful implementation. Their guidance is both comprehensive and practical, providing valuable insights for organizations looking to improve their strategic planning processes and achieve their goals.
- GenresManagement
202 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 1, 2022
11 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 13, 2023
Strategy as Leadership is a must-read for anyone seeking to address tough challenges and implement strategy in a corporate setting. Authors Roberto Vassolo and Natalia Weisz have drawn on their deep experience as academic and business consultants to bring a measure of predictability to the tough work of managing loss and change in a competitive context.
Full of vivid case studies, Strategy as Leadership provides clear guidelines for senior management teams to understand the context of their biggest challenges and work with others to make sense of situation and implement effective strategy. The book is highly readable and immediately applicable in companies large and small.
While offering roadmaps for spotting and responding to challenges associated with growth, innovation, corporate crises, and the need for structural change, Vassolo and Weisz also acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all. They coach the reader to anticipate industry trends and recessions. The authors' vast real-world experience reveals clues for the reader about how to diagnose internal and external pressures and navigate around them.
If you are a student of Adaptive Leadership or the Kansas Leadership Center Leadership Framework, this book builds your capacity to bring those principles to life in a corporate setting. As Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky write in their Forward to the book, "Natalia and Roberto's animating insight is that for strategic planning to work, the process must be understood as adaptive, not technical work. And that means bringing into the planning process all the tools and frameworks that help teams and organizations deal with the conflict, resolution of competing values, and the losses that are part and parcel of doing adaptive work.”
Full of vivid case studies, Strategy as Leadership provides clear guidelines for senior management teams to understand the context of their biggest challenges and work with others to make sense of situation and implement effective strategy. The book is highly readable and immediately applicable in companies large and small.
While offering roadmaps for spotting and responding to challenges associated with growth, innovation, corporate crises, and the need for structural change, Vassolo and Weisz also acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all. They coach the reader to anticipate industry trends and recessions. The authors' vast real-world experience reveals clues for the reader about how to diagnose internal and external pressures and navigate around them.
If you are a student of Adaptive Leadership or the Kansas Leadership Center Leadership Framework, this book builds your capacity to bring those principles to life in a corporate setting. As Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky write in their Forward to the book, "Natalia and Roberto's animating insight is that for strategic planning to work, the process must be understood as adaptive, not technical work. And that means bringing into the planning process all the tools and frameworks that help teams and organizations deal with the conflict, resolution of competing values, and the losses that are part and parcel of doing adaptive work.”
May 9, 2023
This is a short book by two strong scholars about understanding strategy in terms of successful adaptation to leadership challenges. There is a lot more to the story. I must do some further processing of this rich work. FULL REVIEW TO FOLLOW.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews