FOCUS : Strategic Alignment
Strategy is often seen as a planning process dependent on external analysis that will illuminate a perfect path to the future. An alternative view is that strategy is a set of leadership conversations and choices.
These leadership conversations and choices constitute a context that informs choices large and small being made throughout the organization every day. The quality and outcome of these conversations produce organizational focus or blurring; alignment or discord; cohesion of identity or an identity crisis.
The decisive choices of strategy are about the organization’s:
- Purpose & Ambition – For what does this organization exist? What do we say defines success?
- Stakeholder Commitments – Who else has a stake in this organization? What are we promising to them?
- Strategic Assets &emdash; What do we have that makes us uniquely capable of succeeding?
- Guiding Beliefs &emdash; What are the critical assumptions that we are betting everything on?