CLIENT NEED: STRATEGY CLARITY

Strategy Manifesto

We help leadership teams make the strategic choices and commitments their ambition requires, and express them in a document that the organization can act on.

The manifesto explains the choices needed to execute the ambition.

The document connects the business context with the decisions and commitments that follow.

Context

What has changed, and why does it matter?

Challenge

What must the business address?

Ambition

What do we intend to achieve?

Strategic choices

Where will we compete and commit resources?

Execution

What must change in the organization?

Next steps

What happens next?

We help your leadership team reach decisions it can collectively own and execute.

Leaders need to agree on what they are committing to.

They may have approved the strategy while holding different interpretations of its priorities, investment requirements and implications for their businesses.

They need a way to resolve legitimate disagreements.

Protecting current earnings, funding growth and maintaining customer commitments can pull leaders in different directions. Developing the manifesto makes those tensions explicit and gives the team a basis for deciding.

Every leader needs to explain and uphold the same choices.

Ownership becomes meaningful when leaders can explain the reasoning themselves and support decisions that require changes within their own functions.

The next layer of management needs to know what changes for them.

They need sufficient clarity to set priorities, commit people and make decisions without continually reopening the strategy.

Examine what the strategy requires of the organization.

What work must it perform well? What does that require of formal organization, people and skills, culture, and leadership? Then examine the relationships between them.

Read about the Congruence Model

We help you develop the strategy yourselves.

Your team brings knowledge of the business, its customers and its operating realities. We bring structure, external perspective and facilitation to help you examine the choices and reach decisions together.

We start with the strategy work already completed. Through drafting and working sessions, we help leaders make differing assumptions explicit, resolve disagreements and agree on commitments. Your team owns the direction and the decisions.

We believe a strategy that leaders help create has a stronger basis for implementation. The manifesto captures commitments they have developed together and are prepared to carry through with their teams.

The choices agreed in the manifesto establish what the organization needs to deliver. Where organizational barriers remain, we use the Congruence Model to investigate what needs to change.

Research for this work

Selected books from our professors that deepen the questions examined in this offering.

Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator’s Dilemma

Charles A. O’Reilly and Michael L. Tushman · 2021

Competing by Design: The Power of Organizational Architecture

David A. Nadler and Michael L. Tushman · 1998

Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective

Rebecca Henderson, Ranjay Gulati and Michael L. Tushman, editors · 2015

See how we work and who would contribute.

How we work

Our team

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