Strategy as Leadership: Facing Adaptive Challenges in Organizations

Forward by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky. 

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 flaw: 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 losses: 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.

Roberto S. Vassolo is a Full Professor in Strategic Management at IAE Business School (Argentina) - Universidad Austral, and is a visiting professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, School of Engineering and Systems.

He directs the Program in Strategic Leadership and the Doctoral Program at IAE Business School . He is the co-editor in chief of Long-Range Planning. In the last 20 years, he has worked in strategic consulting with Latin American and multinational companies from different industrial sectors.

His current research fields encompass strategic management along the business cycle, competitive dynamics in natural resource industries, and strategic leadership. His research has been published in Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Management, Research Policy, Strategic Organization, Academy of Management Perspectives, and Harvard Business Review, among others. In addition, he is the author of Strategy as Leadership (Stanford University Press), and the related Harvard Business Review article "What you lose with your new strategy". 

Natalia Weisz is an academic and business consultant in Adaptive Leadership. She is a Full Professor at IAE Business School (Argentina) and studied Adaptive Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She obtained her Ph.D. in Strategic Management at Purdue University. Natalia weaves together Adaptive Leadership, Sensemaking, Storytelling, and Strategic Management to help managers strengthen their ability to exercise leadership.