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?