What is strategy? The truth is, genuinely few people know, or more precisely my point, not many who should know do. A few days ago a business man informed me of his strategy for managing ‘phone calls. I found the idea of having a strategy for managing ‘phone calls somewhat difficult to grasp be honest. My challenge with what he was telling me lay in my understanding and knowledge of strategy; consider the following definitions:

Strategy – a plan of action or policy to achieve a major or overall aims

Strategy – the art of planning and directing overall operations or movements in war or battle

Clearly, the latter acknowledges the concept of strategy having its origins in military activity; however, the following definition from www.managementstudyguide.com is, in my mind, a good business / general definition well articulated and easily understood.

“A general direction set for the company and its various components to achieve a desired state in the future.”

So what? Clearly, managing the volume of communication we all receive these days may well require some forethought and possibly a degree of minor planning activity though this hardly requires a strategy! That is, unless the major overall business or company activity in the future is managing volume communication. Furthermore, I believe, so long as people pursue the verbal equivalent of ‘power dressing’ in order to impress over correct use and application of language to articulate accurately and precisely what they mean, difficult or challenging concepts to master will remain clouded at best and inaccessible at worst. We frequently deal with clients who desperately need to develop and implement a strategy yet struggle to truly understand what strategy is and even find planning difficult to master.

So did the gentleman in question really mean he has a plan for dealing with the high volume of his phone calls? Consider first the following definitions:

Plan (noun) – a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something

Plan (verb) – decide on and arrange in advance

In fairness he had considered and decided in advance how he was going to arrange and prioritise his return calls and which calls he would answer as they came. So he had planned his intended short term actions though I seriously doubt he went to the trouble of recording a formal plan. In establishing an understanding of the relationship between strategy and planning I believe it would be useful to consider the following definition of a plan from www.businessdictionary.com:

“Written account of intended future course of action (scheme) aimed at achieving specific goal(s) or objective(s) within a specific time frame.”

Strategy is concerned with a more general and overarching position in the long term.

In reality, the gentleman in question had a successful tactical approach for dealing with a lot of ‘phone calls made to him daily. A pedantic statement perhaps, accurate and correct undoubtedly, widely understood – who knows?

How do people develop as leaders without the benefit of experiential learning? I meet so many coaches who claim to develop leadership within their coachees who have never been in leadership positions themselves. Their experience is based on learning from books and not in practice. I believe that three key attributes of a leader which cannot be developed without experience are developing trust, managing risk and exercising judgement.

An effective team has to trust its leader and trust each other if they are going to be cohesive in their disposition. How does a leader earn the teams trust without developing  that trust through experience. Team members must identify their leader as trustworthy before they will trust them. It is the same with other team members. Trust has to be earned and it has to be earned through experience it cannot appear on order.

Leadership is about recognising risk and mitigating it as far as is possible. But like most things in life managing risk comes from experiencing life and experiencing risks. What risks are worth taking and what are not? Leadership  and the management of risk are about the future they are therefore more of an art than a science as they cannot be prescribed. Risk management is about experience and the gut feel developed through the hard knocks of life.

Risk is exercising judgement and making the right calls comes from learned wisdom which is a combination of classroom and book aided learning and experiential learning and it is this rich combination that informs the great leaders. The combination and the ability to associate current circumstances with knowledge that allows the great leader the wisdom and judgement to effect change within an organisation in the right way at the right time.

Leadership can be learned from a book but it is  a brave leader who reaches judgements based solely on non experiential learning. Most great leaders I have met and come across stretch their leadership through the combination of   non experiential and experiential learning mixed with the ability to hone their leadership through reflection and pre emption of the issues that will challenge their leadership.  You can’t be a leader without feeling it! You can’t be a leader without learning as you experience it!

What is the strategic health of a business? Well it is its ability to learn and adapt to its current circumstances whilst shaping itself and its environment to ensure that it has a sustained competitive advantage.  Strategic health is about  comprehending risk and developing strategy a whilst managing  talent.

Any organisation must be fit for purpose in terms of the present but it must also become fit for purpose in the future and that requires strategic sense and leadership. It must be flexible and able to adapt to the  prevailing market conditions.

An organisation has to be able to grow and develop both intrinsically and extrinsically. For growth does not necessarily require real estate it may be just in influence. An organisation that does not learn does not grow and that requires courage for it is the inevitable failures that generate eventual success. Therefore a healthy organisation must be prepared to fail and learn from that failure. A blame culture restricts learning!

Willpower and the ability to keep going even in the most arduous of times is key to a healthy organisation, providing the will is informed and monitored and the lessons valuable and it is not obsessive.

A healthy organisation needs to have a stretch capability and redundance that allows it to rest and regenerate when it can whilst being able to generate power and surge when it needs to. The margins must not be too large that they become unaffordable yet an over lean organisation is an inflexible, one paced organisation that has little time for learning and initiative.

A healthy organisation is one that looks ahead, one that takes the lessons from the past to inform the future whist recognising the changes in its market environment. Strategically it is not entrapped in the present yet it is garnering, processing relevant information and imagining the future in order to adapt to it and shape it where it can.

Is your organisation strategically healthy?

How important is leadership in relation to success? Some modern academics argue that success can happen without top level leadership. For me one 0f the key ingredients to organisational success is top level leadership. We have all seen successful organisations driven by the philosophy and drive of one key individual fail as that individual is replaced by someone else. We have all seen organisations that seem to carry on in perpetuity  as leaders come and go. So what makes the difference? Richard Branson,   Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Bill Gates  and last but not least Steve Jobs all run or have all run globally important successful organisations in recent times. However  Barclays, McDonalds, Disney and BP are also all successful  global companies that have broken the shackles of  an individual’s leadership style and competence and still preserved their status.  TESCOs after Sir Terry Leahy  and now under Phillip Clarke are still in leadership transition that will bring  many challenges particularly with consolidation after such rapid Global growth. The way that Phillip Clarke takes the organisation forward will be fascinating as we enter challenging  financial times throughout the world apart from Brazil of course.

Organisations are all different and all have leaders who serve them in differing ways  but success and leadership are linked and here are a few leadership aspects that ensure the maintenance of success within an organisation.

Key to any successful organisation is understanding of its current position. How many organisations truly know where there current position vis a vis competition, product life span and commercial risk. Without a leader focused on understanding the bigger picture in terms of risk, succession and positioning an organisation can only have a short lifespan.

All businesses have an ethos/culture  and it is important that if relevant that culture is preserved after all it is what got you there in the first place. Organisations that have a successful and relevant culture need to preserve it through induction procedures for new employees,  succession plans to ensure those who have grown up within the organisation who understand its doctrine are its future leaders as they preserve the continuous inspiration afforded by that ethos/culture.

Every organisation needs a vision and the vision must be owned by all within the organisation. Vision is not the sole province of senior executives they are the custodians but for vision to be effective it must be owned by the people within. If it is it will generate self sustaining pulling power to drive the organisation to the achievement  of its vision.

Within the vision  are objectives which whist being aligned to the overall vision they must also be challenging and rewarding to those who are responsible to achieve them. They must be timely and measurable and they must be clearly understood.

Goals  within  objectives are simply tasks to fulfil and as tasks they also need to be inspiring and achievable. They also need clear boundaries and controls to keep them on track and the desired end state of the task  must be easily recognised.

Now risk and leadership are particularly closely linked particularly in the more frugal times. A leader needs to know what are the true risks the organisation is taking; what are the warning signs and what are the implications should the worst case come to fruition. There are plenty of  recent examples of when this did not happen Zavi, Woolworths, RBS and then lets look at the US banking collapse in 2010 with 20 banks closing in two months with well over 100 closing in the year. Risk has moved up the leadership agenda and needs to be considered and understood at the highest levels.

Leadership is about the art of the possible it is not the science that management is as it is far more futuristic in its doctrine. It is about the use of experiential learning to influence and motivate people for the future and the challenges that brings. Management is a science and therefore based in the present and based on sound evidence. Lets take targets as an example managers set targets to motivate and control performance. Leaders understand where the organisation is and ensure  continuous improvement through effective inspiration, motivation and judgement.  Both are required in an organisation but for me the manager is the policeman for the leader, the person who keeps people on the successful track set by the leader.