Strategic Flexibility Requires "Primacy of Purpose"
Mike Figliuolo
Managing Director, thoughtLEADERS, LLC?, LinkedIn Learning Author, and Board Member
To execute a strategy well, you must remain flexible but remember the primacy of your strategic purpose. Doing so lets your team act while still focusing on the goal.
There's an old Army saying that "no plan survives first contact with the enemy." (I'm sure some navy or marine guy out there will attribute this comment to their branch of service but to be clear, it came from the Army... well, actually it came from Helmuth von Motltke but his version was much less pithy. Gotta love his helmet though...). This principle holds true in business as well.
You can put together the mother of all PowerPoint presentations, make massive strat plan binders for the Board of Directors or the heads of your business unit, create Excel models that cause the lights to dim when you run them and lay out huge project plans in MS Project. The thing is, as soon as you've briefed your plan, it's irrelevant. The world has changed. Oil spikes. Consumer sentiment. A presidential election. New regulations. Disruptive technologies and even more disruptive competitors. Not to mention natural churn in the labor markets (see "Talkin 'bout My Generation ").
In these changing times, it's easy to get "off strategy" and chase things that seem important. Unfortunately you can end up behaving like a puppy in a park (Ever seen a puppy in a park? They chase EVERYTHING that looks interesting.). The only thing that can save you and keep you "on strategy" is something called "primacy of purpose."
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Mike is the managing director of?thoughtLEADERS, LLC ?– a leadership development training firm.