For a long time, the response from management experts in relation to the central challenge facing business leaders today has focused on the need for change. While change is present in many organizations, the perspective has always been that change is treated as a one-time event and that a business only needs to move from one point to another to achieve success. Indeed, this A-to-B approach is at the core of many conventional strategies, but in a rapidly-changing and dynamic world, it’s outdated.
Tarek Saadi, an accomplished business consultant who was certified at Colombia Business School in 2012, knows that modern business leaders must adapt to various changing dynamics within their environment. Whether that’s global economic uncertainty, disruptive technologies, or high levels of complexity, entrepreneurs require a different approach from the A-to-B style. According to Professor William G. Pietersen, the challenge for the modern business leader is to ‘create and lead an adaptive enterprise,’ which requires continually adapting to changes in the environment.
Strategic Learning
Maintaining a competitive advantage is no longer about creating a new service or product. As Professor Pietersen explains, an organization’s ability to be adaptive is critical, with this strategy becoming the platform through which business leaders can learn the practical process and tools needed to build and lead these types of businesses.
It is based on this premise that Professor Pietersen developed Strategic Learning, a process that helps leaders create and implement breakthrough strategies. The process has been deployed at various notable companies globally such as Deloitte, SAP, and The Girl Scouts of America, among others, and it is the core methodology at Columbia Business School for executive education programs. From a general view, the program has four key steps – learn, focus, align, and execute – that build on each other in a continuous cycle.
The Learn and Focus steps are the basis upon which a firm creates its strategy. This strategy will consider many factors, including the challenges, insights and implications of various choices and how they channel into the business’s key priorities. From this point, the cycle moves into the Align stage, which ensures that various aspects of the business – including its people, culture, structure, process, measures, and rewards – are aligned for strategy execution. Aptly, Execute is the last phase of the cycle, and it’s here that the business implements and experiments with the action plan from the previous phases.
Collectively, these phases create a mutually reinforcing process that keeps the business leader continually learning and adapting. While focus is important for strategy, the process also introduces flexibility and creative thinking to the benefit of the organization.