This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Strategic Agility -- If an organization's strategy is it's largest project, then a bit of agility in the form of accepting/embracing uncertainty around an anticipated roadmap is required. Planned tactics need to be both prioritized and adjusted along the way as they run into reality. This post is the start of some thinking along these limes. More will be coming after these starting thoughts...
An organization both owns and is the result of the strategy as well as all of its previous strategies. The strategy is the soul of the accumulated efforts of the stakeholders -- the actualization of the organization's values.
In today's "flattened" organizations, one is likely to find strategic initiatives coming from the ranks of middle management as responses to trying to meet competing and contradictory stakeholder demands. But this is nothing new. Strategy was never the exclusive domain of the executive suite. Potential strategic initiatives have always come from anywhere and everywhere in the organization.
It does, however, remain the responsibility of the executive suite, as those most directly responsible to the owning stakeholders of the organization, to assure that those initiatives that do bubble up to the realm of official strategy are consistent with the larger and longer term goals and mission of the organization.
In some cases, top management and those close to them have traditionally served as the gatekeepers to the "official strategy." Where an evolution may be happening in flatter organizations, or even in some enlightened older pyramids, is that the executive suite is replacing the gatekeeper role with one of assuring a broader and clearer communication of strategy. This approach would assure that the new initiatives coming from the organization are easily understood to be in alignment with desired directions or not, and if not, reviewed to either make a case for a new strategic direction or self censored if clearly inappropriate.
It's also top management's responsibility to assure that the effect (or even the existence) of competing and contradictory stakeholder demands are minimized. Such systemic conflicts are rooted in the assumptions that support either the written policies (the strategy) or the unwritten (the culture). It's the role of the coordinators of the strategy to set up processes to identify these disconnects and implement new tactics to deal with them.
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