WHAT’S NEW
MANAGEMENT FOR DESIGN Spring 2017
Strategy, leadership and where it all goes wrong
In many businesses strategy is often confused with operations, resulting in a lack of alignment between strategy and execution. Furthermore, strategy and leadership are frequently viewed and discussed as very separate concepts that exist in independent, distinct boxes. Just think about books you may have read on these subjects over the past few years. They are all about either strategy or leadership, but never about both or about the relationship between the two that is a necessity for a business to succeed. In reality, you can’t have one without the other. In our experience, business strategy gets set and the leaders rely on others to execute most of the time. There are several reasons why this ends up happening, but, for strategy to work and to be accepted throughout a business, it needs to be executed by those at the top. The issue here is that most employees in any business have other things they are working on and unless strategic change is modelled clearly then most people will just continue working on what they were already doing and no real change occurs. It is up the leaders to set an example.
