Strategy Archives - Strategic Leadership

03 May

Hope is not a strategy

In Strategy

Hope is not a strategy - As anyone who writes a book can attest, it’s both gratifying and nerve-racking to see how the ideas resonate with your readers. Since my colleagues and I wrote Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick, we’ve been circling the globe discussing the research with the...

21 Sep

Five Strategies Every Leader Must Embrace to Harness Disruption

In Strategy

Five Strategies Every Leader Must Embrace to Harness Disruption -

26 Aug

Making Your Strategy More Agile? Consider These Risks

In Strategy

Making Your Strategy More Agile? Consider These Risks - It is frequently argued that strategy’s holy grail—the pursuit of sustained competitive advantage—is futile in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. Instead, so the argument goes, organisations should focus on agile strategy, thereby realising a dynamic and continuous stream of short-term advantages. But is...

19 Aug

How to Excel at Both Strategy and Execution

In Strategy

How to Excel at Both Strategy and Execution - For decades, we’ve often thought of leadership profiles in unique buckets—two popular varieties were the “visionaries”, who embrace strategy and think about amazing things to do, and the “operators”, who get stuff done. We intuitively knew that there must be...

05 Aug

Do You Think HR is Effective?

In HR, Strategy

Do You Think HR is Effective? - Dave Ulrich stresses the importance of relationships over roles in his assessment of how HR deals with its own internal challenges. HR for HR means that HR professionals apply to their own function the knowledge and tools they apply to their organisations. This...

26 Nov

The Big Lies of Strategy

In Strategy

The Big Lies of Strategy by Roger L. Martin - You don’t need a 100-page strategic plan. Strategy is actually about making five specific choices. - THOSE WHO KNOW ME WELL know that I have a love/hate relationship with all things strategic. On the one hand, I hate ‘strategic planning’...

19 Nov

The Collapse of Strategy and Its Implications

In Strategy

The Collapse of Strategy and Its Implications - “Strategy” might be one of the most elemental parts of a business. And the most misunderstood. Perpetuating the problem is the proliferation of corporate strategy groups and “strategy” job titles that involve very little strategy in the economic sense of the term...

09 Jul

8 Shifts That Will Take Your Strategy Into High Gear

In Strategy

Developing a great strategy starts with changing the dynamics in your strategy room. Here’s how. Many strategy planning processes begin with a memo like the one below. Such missives lead managers to spend months gathering inputs, mining data, scanning the marketplace for opportunities and threats, and formulating responses. In the...

14 Feb

Strategy, Culture and Values

In Culture, Leadership, Strategy

How to Create an Environment of Continuous Change, Learning and Improvement - February is traditionally a time when our new year’s resolutions begin to lose momentum, and we start to slip back into our original habits. Change is hard, after all. The same is often true in business – in...

16 Jan

Structure Follows Strategy – But May Not Look Like You Imagined

In Strategy, Structure & Processes

In the world of structural design, one size does not fit all. It pays massive dividends to get the structure fit for the purpose and strategy of your very specific business. In this article, John Sutherland discusses the seven structural archetypes and the six guidelines for structural design to make organisations...