42 leader to leader
Growing a business, or even stabilizing an organization,
is risky business, and it’s getting worse as the rate
of change in the world escalates. Organizations are
becoming more global and experiencing greater competition,
making the game of business even more challenging.
However, in this evolving world, many of the
tools used to do business have not kept pace. At the
core of any organization’s founding, maturing, growth,
or even reduction is a strategy; yet the strategy-making
process that has been refined, written about by many
experts, and taught in business schools remains fundamentally
unquestioned.
This article proposes that the institutional way of strategy
making needs to adapt to today’s business environment,
and that it needs a major overhaul, at least
for organizations experiencing high levels of change. I
argue that the strategy-making process is similar to software
development in that both traditionally were very
big picture, and both had high failure rates. Traditional
software development was and often continues to be
done via a waterfall approach (falling from the top to
the bottom of the organization). Big conversations kick
off the process that leads to large-scale implementation
efforts, cascading processes, and ending in a final
release to the public. Unfortunately, those releases are
out of date upon delivery, missing the mark in meeting
the needs of customers, because needs have changed
since the waterfall process started.
In the world of programming, a new model has emerged
that makes software development not only more agile
and timely but more accurate. Reduced errors, higher
customer satisfaction, and improved product are the
outcomes of extreme programming models. Extreme
strategizing™ parallels the extreme programming
model. The words reflect a process that is different
from traditional strategy making. Extreme strategizing
is a continuous process, while strategy making is an
event (a waterfall event); that is the core difference and
the key advantage of extreme strategizing.
The Standard Strategy Process
Here is a brief description of the typical process of
strategy making for a large organization with multiple
business units:
• Internal strategy department or consulting firm
starts the process.
• Senior executive team interviewed.
• Research conducted.
• Senior executive team meets off-site for intense
strategy discussions.
• New five-year strategy devised.
• Strategy documented and shared with core senior
team.
• Strategy summary disseminated to the next level of
management.
• Business unit strategies repeat the process, creating
strategies that fit the overall requirements.
exe c utive forum
Extreme
Strategizing
Theresa M. Welbourne
spring 2009 43
• Business unit strategies are given to functional area
leaders.
• Functional area leaders devise their own strategies
that fit.
• Managers in functional areas create their own
matching strategies.
• Individual employees are given objectives and
goals that align with the department strategy, business
strategy, and corporate strategy (in theory).
As anyone who has been through this process knows,
it takes a long time. What many people know but are
hesitant to admit is that the process is outdated. The
search for organizational agility, flexibility, and continuous
change hint that the process does not work,
but most efforts have tried to add tools to complement
the traditional strategy-making process rather than seek
to replace it altogether.
Through an ongoing study of leaders that I have been
doing since 2003 (called the Leadership Pulse; www.
leadershippulse.com), the result of the problems of
traditional strategy making are documented in detail.
Leaders’ confidence in themselves, their ability
to execute on their firm’s vision, and their own
leadership teams have all been declining steadily.
Leader energy (a quick measure of engagement) has
also suffered. And in the masses of comments explaining
why these metrics are declining lies a plea
for a strategy-making process that is more agile and
responsive to the needs of leaders and the people
who work for them.
The qualitative and quantitative data from the Leadership
Pulse studies (surveys that go out every two to
three months to a global sample of leaders) tell a story
of leaders who are confused. C-level executives are saying
that they go in to work on Monday morning, and
they are not sure what to do. Managers are unclear
about priorities. Respondents tell stories about having
more and more projects dumped on their desks with
no one taking old ones away.
These are people who have memorized their strategy;
they have objectives tied to the strategic business mantra.
However, the strategy is not helping them. The
strategy misinforms because it is disconnected from
current business realities.
In the Leadership Pulse data, I read about managers
who are in the trenches working with clients, talking to
suppliers, and dealing with new day-to-day challenges
that they are