Living Leadership, 3rd Edition

12

Strategy

Nudge it forward

The dirty little secret of strategy is that it’s only clear with hindsight.

In the research, we saw a pattern. Many leadership groups at the top of companies felt that they had a clear strategy. But they were frustrated by the difficulty of getting middle managers to take responsibility for making the strategy become a reality in their areas. It was one of the reasons for many leadership development programmes in large corporations. These programmes often have the task of answering the question: “How can we get them (the middle managers) to ‘buy into’ the strategy and provide a lead in implementing it?” – and the implicit rider: “How can the programmes protect us, the top managers, from any further discussion ...