The New Strategic Leadership — Driving Change, Getting Results

Abstract

This chapter was prompted when I received an invitation to speak at a national conference on the subject of “Planning in Chaotic Times”. The conference was well attended. Many of the participants said that their organisations, and in some cases their whole industries, were in turmoil. They also felt that conventional management approaches such as planning and budgeting provided no help in the kinds of crises which they were experiencing.

This chapter also appears in Führungskräfte und Führungserfolg, Ulrich Krystek & Jörg Link (eds), Gabler Verlag, Wiesbaden (1995) and in Long Range Planning, Vol. 28 (5), 1995, pp. 71–81.

This chapter adresses the issue of how to develop and implement strategies for organizations which are in a turbulent environment. In this situation strategic leadership is about managing radical change to achieve a dramatic improvement in performance, and business strategy is the simple business logic which management use to explain to shareholds and other stakeholders how they see the environment changing and how their organizations will survive and grow.

For companies which are experiencing rapid change, traditional approaches to corporate planning are too bureaucratic. They need to be supplemented with new approaches which enable management to take charge of strategy and to develop strategies for implementation.