in total, divided into three three-week sessions spread over three years. Between sessions, students return to their businesses and start to apply what they have learned. Debriefs the following year are an opportunity for feedback and reflection on what has worked and what hasn’t. This structure has given the faculty an exceptional opportunity to develop a hands-on curriculum that brings theory and practice much closer together, even for a school that has always championed the connection.
Why do these talented, seasoned managers from every major world culture come to this program? As heads of their companies, why do they elect to spend tens of thousands of dollars to send themselves to school?
THE VIEW FROM THE BALCONY
If past participants are any indication, these executives have not come to seek specific answers to narrow questions. They have come to learn how to be more effective leaders and to find ways to make their businesses more successful. Successful in what ways, and through what means, for most, is still an open question. They are here to throw themselves into the program, to be challenged, to discover what they might learn in this environment.
This experience will be an important juncture for many, in their careers and even their lives. What they learn here will lead them to think in broader, more far-reaching ways. To explain how this happens, I’ve always liked the metaphor of a dance taking place in a great hall. Most dancers spend all their time on the dance floor, moved by the music, jostled by dancers around them, completely absorbed in the flow. But it’s not until they extricate themselves from the crowd and move to the balcony above that the larger picture becomes clear. It is then that overall patterns become apparent and new perspectives emerge. Often these reveal opportunities for better choices about what to do down on the dance floor.
Many EOPers have spent years without ever leaving the dance floor. Absorbed by the day-to-day challenges of running a business, they’ve never gone to the balcony. On one level, our job is to help them understand the value of going to the balcony in the first place. On another, it is to equip them with the tools to see their dances in new ways, ways that reveal options they may never have considered before.
THE STRATEGY COURSE
When it’s time for the faculty to introduce their courses, I stand and give a quick summary of the work we’ll be doing in strategy. Like most businesspeople, these managers are likely to be familiar with at least a vague definition of strategy. The word itself comes from the ancient Greek for “general”—specifically for the general on campaign in the field. In business, strategy is a company’s campaign in the marketplace: the domain in which it competes, how it competes, and what it wants to accomplish.
We will begin our journey with the fundamentals—what strategy is, how to craft it, and how to evaluate it. We’ll then push the envelope on current practice by challenging strategy’s elusive goal—the long-run sustainable competitive advantage—and introduce a dynamic model of strategy that is better grounded and better suited for the competitive realities most managers face.
All of this material is prelude to the last and most challenging task they will face here, when every member of the class will be asked to apply the concepts and frameworks we’ve been studying to their own companies and present their own strategies for critiquing by their EOP colleagues. The exercise takes many days and, in the end, the class votes on a winner, what they consider the “best strategy” in the group.
This step from the general to the highly particular, from the objective to the subjective, is where things become profoundly real for most executives. This is when the appraisals of cases—now their cases—get deadly serious and the discussions especially heartfelt. These are competitive people. A spirit of intense rivalry prevails. Most refine their strategies through multiple iterations, often working through the night for one more iteration. These weeks are arduous for some, exhilarating for others, and, for most, a healthy mix of both.
GETTING TO THE REALITY OF YOUR STRATEGY
Having seen hundreds if not thousands of such strategies in their initial form, what is clear to me is this: Many leaders haven’t thought about their own strategies in a very deep way. Often, there is a curious gap between their intellectual understanding of strategy and their ability to drive those insights home in their own businesses.
Some EOPers find it extremely difficult to identify why their companies exist. Accustomed to describing their businesses by the industries they’re in or the products they make, they can’t articulate the specific needs their businesses fill, or the unique points that distinguish them from competitors on anything beyond a superficial level. Nor have they spent much time thinking concretely about where they want their companies to be in ten years and the forces, internal and external, that will get them there.
If leaders aren’t clear about this, imagine the confusion in their businesses three or four levels lower. Yet, people throughout a business—in marketing, production, service, as well as near the top of the organization—must make decisions every day that could and should be based on some shared sense of what the company is trying to be and do. If they disagree about that, or simply don’t understand it, how can they make consistent decisions that move the company forward? Similarly, how can leaders expect customers, providers of capital, or other stakeholders to understand what is really important about their companies if they themselves can’t identify it? This is truly basic—there is no way a business can thrive until these questions are answered.
Even so, the exercises in EOP are designed to do more than set high standards, communicate concepts, and improve participants’ existing strategies. The overarching goal is something different, something deeper and more personal. It is to make clear to these executives that strategy is the heart of the ongoing leadership their companies need from them. That’s why competition for “best strategy” is so hard fought and generates so much energy. CEOs, accustomed to asking questions and being deferred to, are challenged by their peers and encouraged to think and rethink parts of their strategies they’d taken for granted. Most of them describe it as a pivotal experience that fundamentally changes their views of their own businesses.
Behind the scenes, though, the real contest is closer in: It’s each of these leaders pushing their own ideas to the increasingly high standards they themselves have come to demand of excellent strategies and of themselves as leaders. It’s that process, more than any short-term answers they might find here, that will serve them well in the long run.
LEADERSHIP AND STRATEGY ARE INSEPARABLE
Many leaders today do not understand the ongoing, intimate connection between leadership and strategy. These two aspects of what leaders do, once tightly linked, have grown apart. Now specialists help managers analyze their industries and position their businesses for competitive advantage, and strategy has become largely a job for experts, or something confined to an annual planning process. In this view, once a strategy has been identified, and the next steps specified, the job of the strategist is finished. All that remains to be done is to implement the plan and defend the sustainable competitive advantage it has wrought. Or at least that’s the positive take on the story.
But, if this were so, the process of crafting a strategy would be easy to separate from the day-to-day management of a firm. All a leader would have to do is figure it out once, or hire a consulting firm to figure it out, and make sure it’s brilliant. If this were so, the strategist wouldn’t have to be concerned with how the organization gets from here to there—the great execution challenge—or how it will capitalize on the learning it accumulates along the way.
But this is not so.
What’s been forgotten is that strategy is not a destination or a solution. It’s not a problem to be solved and settled. It’s a journey. It needs continuous, not intermittent, leadership.
It
