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We really emphasize the ways in which strategy's an ongoing iterative process.
That it is an essential part of what you do as a leader.
Whether you think about what you're doing when you're doing it as strategy or not.
So you're doing strategy all the time every time you make a decision
because at the most basic level,
strategy is just about deciding how to allocate your resources.
So every time you make a decision about whether to buy
inputs from one supplier or another.
Or whether to invest in this facility or
to do this marketing plan, you're doing strategy.
And our fundamental view is it's better to do that self-consciously and
to be aware that you're doing it than to not be aware of it.
And so, I think we oftentimes could benefit from demystifying what strategy
is and just realize that a lot of us and a lot of different managerial and
leadership roles are doing strategy all the time.
And it's better to be self-reflective about it then to be doing it blindly.
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A strong leader is somebody who's almost able to think like a scientist,
who's constantly able to move back and forth between the conceptual model or
the theory of the way they think the world works and
the reality that they are encountering.
And then they're able to translate the experiences that we're having or
that you're having as a group into a sensible way of thinking about
the world that the rest of the group can really get on board with.
I think really what leaders do is they build a community.
The responsibility of a leader is to think about the group as a whole and
the social group that they're operating in.
A manager is usually more concerned with kind of technical aspects
of getting the job done so how do I build the most efficient process.
But people also need a sense of belonging and
they need a sense of kind of community and they need a sense of purpose and
I think really that's what the leader's goal is.
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You have a plan that you wanna execute and part of your job as a strategic
leader is really to turn that plan into coherent action, right?
And part of that is about what investment decisions you make and
how you allocate your resources.
But a lot of it is also about how you organize your people.
And the way you structure the incentives,
the way you structure reporting relationships,
how much attention you pay to the culture, what kind of culture that you wanna have.
And even at the level of things that we think of as kind of HR,
like things like recruiting and who it is that you're gonna bring on to the team.
Those things are all incredibly important.
Cause if you don't have the alignment between the way you've set up your
organization and the strategy you're trying to accomplish, and
the key assumptions in that strategy, you're not gonna be successful.
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I think the core question in strategy is about when you have an innovation,
when you have an idea and you kind of see an opportunity there.
The problem that a lot of innovators run into is that
they focus almost entirely on the nature of the opportunity.
They really think about wow this product is really gonna do something different
for people.
That's not easy to do, right?
It is very hard to come up with great innovations, but
actually the harder part and I think that we really emphasize in this course is,
it's not enough to come up with the innovation.
You also have to come up with a plan for
how you're gonna profit from that innovation.
And that is oftentimes much more difficult.
And part of that in balls really recognizing what the obstacles
are that stand in your way.
And those can be obstacles in terms of powerful buyers or suppliers.
They can be obstacles in terms of rivals or potential entrance into the industry.
How do you build a plan?
How do you build a strategy that's gonna allow you to overcome those obstacles?
Because oftentimes, you come to the table with this great insight about
an innovation that's gonna have value.
And there's a lot of work in getting to that point, and we'd really hate
to see the work that you've done up until that point go to waste because you never
figured out how to actually capture the value that you're generating.
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So I think, when we think about leadership,
we tend to think about particular individuals.
So we think about Gandhi or Martin Luther King, or Steve Jobs,
or these great figures that we all think of as role models.
And I think it's important to learn lessons from people like that, but
I think it's also important to remember that you are who you are.
And that you have your own personality that you bring to the table, and
your own strengths and your own weaknesses.
And that effective leaders are ones who recognize what their strengths are, and
recognize what their weaknesses are, and build their leadership style around that.
And it's really important to have alignment between
what your leadership style is, and the kind of organization that you build, and
the kind of strategy that you pursue.
I think we to much too great of an extent think about leaders as
something that is innate.
I think everybody has leadership potential and
it is something that they can develop over time.
I think it could be learned by turning to others and
asking them for in-depth and
brutally honest of assessments of what your strengths and weakness are.
I don't thing there's any doubt though that everybody has the potential to be
a powerful leader in the right situation and at the right time.
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