What strategy? – perception gaps
The HR generalist doesn’t know much about marketing, the branding guy doesn’t care much about finance, the finance folks don’t care too much about solutions sales, the IT guys often feel specifically hostile towards HR, and of course the HR people, dealing with the most important “asset”, are constantly fighting to elevate the function to a “strategic” level;
and here we go, the strategy question: for most, it has nothing to do with reality. “It’s worthless without execution”, “It’s not strategy, it’s the people that matter”, “management, management, management”, “It’s like metaphysics: who cares?”, “It’s just a way for consultants to make an obscene amount of money”, “What the hell is it anyways? Can you explain it in one sentence?”, “culture beats strategy” and the list goes on.
It seems like the question of strategy polarizes. Strategy gets developed, then escalated across the organization, buy-in from staff is BOUGHT often with a great show with star performers and perhaps an air show with fighter jets…yet: all efforts to “align” or “integrate” strategy with operations (if any!), strategy with people, etc. consistently fail miserably. ALWAYS. It’s a fact of life, there is no exception – if you find one and have a closer look you’ll see that it’s only temporary.
Why this is so is more interesting than what field (strategy or operations, or culture) enjoys priority. The purpose of this post is simply to shed light on the hierarchy of priorities and draw awareness to what is important and in what order. Awareness is step zero towards eliminating perception gaps from the organization.
1. Principle based concept (the purpose) is the foundation of
2. both strategy and leadership.
3. Organization is centered around strategy and leadership
4. Operations with its specialized functions is based on the organization.
Awareness of this hierarchy ensures some level of integration across the organization. Awareness of course is highly fragmented and the realization/unfolding never happens linearly along this vertical. Various aspects of the concept may appear simultaneously, having seemingly nothing to do with each other (without actual integration), until somebody connects the dots, and starts an effort of integration.
This guy must be the CEO. If not, the CEO must talk to this guy! If not, it costs more both on the top line and the bottom line, than most people have the courage to believe.
