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we also deal with leadership in the book what why would we begin with leadership
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in a book on strategy it's because we're interested in the in winning outcomes
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the the whole point of strategy and that requires the execution and the orchestration of these approaches in the
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ambidextrous organization now the problem is that the classical model of leadership cascading instructions based
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on experience and judgment down a hierarchical organization and then managing execution against those
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instructions what's perfectly fine in a classical environment but it won't work in say an
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adaptive environment that is much more unpredictable and it's simply not possible for the leader to be having a
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stable instruction set and so that the question becomes how does a leader animate the collage of approaches
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multiple approaches across an organization and in the book we deal with eight facets of leadership that
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need to be taken into consideration in the new environment let me just touch on a few of them so firstly somebody needs
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to diagnose and segment these different approaches to strategy which approach to
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strategy in which part of the organization and somebody needs to disrupt in other words somebody needs to
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say yes that as approach to strategy is not the approach that we need right now somebody needs to coach and deploy pick
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the right people and develop the right people to be deployed against the right approach to strategy because each
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requires a different cognitive skill set and we talked about the need for Inquisition for questioning namely where
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we can't have a stable instruction set sometimes the best we can do is to ask
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really great questions so leaders need to be really good at getting to the bottom of things by by asking the right
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questions so if you like we define the skill set of the ambidextrous leader the title of the book is your strategy
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needs a strategy mentions the word strategy twice but in fact the book is not about strategy
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it's about effective strategy in other words it's about obtaining the winning
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outcomes which are the very reason why we use the word strategy in the first place and therefore necessarily we need
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to think also about implementation now just as we've said that strategy is not one thing we think that
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implementation is not one thing the actions were required to implement strategies vary according to the
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situation and not only that but the relationship between implementing and strategizing also varies according to
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the environment so let me give you two examples in the classical environment the strategizing may consist largely of
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analyzing opportunities and deriving a plan and the implementing may consist of remote execution against that stable
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plan and performance monitoring of that execution against the plan let's think
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about that software company this implementing adaptive strategy really the equation is turned upside down and
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inside out because it starts with experiments from empowered employees at the coal face of the company trying new
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things and some of those new things work and are picked up and communicated and amplified and what a strategy strategy
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is the continuous stream of improved ideas the results from those actions so in this particular case strategizing
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cannot be separated from action and actually the action the experiment comes before the strategy the strategy is a
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result of the implementation if you like and if we went through each of the styles of strategy you'd find that this
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relationship between strategy and implementation and the nature of implementation varies in each case so
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what we really need is not just different approaches to strategizing in different environments but different
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approaches to strategizing implement a implementing innovation culture leadership of all aspects of business in
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each environment so in the process of writing the book we had a little strategic problem of our
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own in fact two problems one of them is that our research showed us that CEOs would probably be interested in what we
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had to say but they may not read the whole book we needed a more concise form of communication the second inconvenient
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truth was that we found that in our survey 150 multinationals we found that the right beliefs about the environment
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and about the choice of approach to strategy did not correlate perfectly with the right behaviors so if you like
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understanding was insufficient necessary but insufficient to be doing the right things so the solution to this was
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really two things the first one was to write a very compact first chapters of the book that could be read in its own
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right and the the second one was to build a game a game for the iPad where we led with experience so the game is
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quite a fun game we take the five boroughs of New York New York where I happen to live why New York because it
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has five there's the number of approaches to strategy and the idea is to win against a fictional opponent
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called Bruce who is named after a founder Bruce Henderson a great strategist in in selling lemonade from a
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lemonade stand in each of these environments and the tricky part is that Bruce is a raised fierce component and
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each environment requires you to not only think but more importantly to act out a very different approach to
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strategy so through experiencing these different environments you develop a muscle memory for what an adaptive
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strategy feels like for what a visionary strategy feels like and then you can go
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backwards into the content you can ask what happened in that game you can read a little bit about the particular
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approach to strategy that was required in that particular environment and you can even click through and and and by
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the book if you're interested so that's the idea of the game many of the approaches that we detail in
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the book may be challenging but not so challenging if you're doing them afresh
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if you're doing them as as a startup if you're a ecommerce company and you're
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putting place a digital marketplace it may be hard in its own right but you you don't have to negate the past to do so
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large corporations have a challenge on top of that which is they have to move away from over previously successful
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recipe and adopt a newer unknown one and they have to pick the right timing and the rate of progression in doing so and
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that's that's that's a really hard problem on many dimensions so you might
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call it rejuvenating the corporation I think the first success factor is to is to really understand that need so the
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the analysis in the book shows quite clearly that the durability and the value of leadership positions is
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increasingly tenuous so there really is a need for large corporations to to look
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ahead at new ways of doing strategy and the second one is to is to revile the problem down because you can't change
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everything everywhere and we've said that it boils down to three essential capabilities one of them is the
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capability of adaptiveness or experimentation the second one is the capability of shaping which is not just
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participating in environments but actually shaping ecosystems and the third one is ambidexterity which is
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comfort with diversity comfort with a mosaic of approaches rather than a single monolithic approach we we
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recently saw the announcement that Google was dividing itself into pieces under a new holding called
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alphabet and this is a great example actually of structural ambidexterity and all of this has to be managed not only
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as a change in the organization but change in people's minds - it requires familiarity with new ways of thinking
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that hopefully we we detail in the book you