Page 56 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

46 HBR Leader’s Handbook

that we interviewed highlighted how successful strategies boosted both the
impact of the organization and their own leadership, too: CEO David
Winn’s breakthrough retail strategy for American Express France in the
1990s earned him a subsequent stream of top job career opportunities;
General Stanley McChrystal was celebrated for the daring network strat-
egy that dramatically degraded Al Qaeda during the Iraq War; Anne
Mulcahy became one of the most influential CEOs of her day for her strat-
egy that rescued Xerox from bankruptcy.
But strategy is not just for CEOs. Most organizations have an overall
corporate strategy that is supported by smaller, more focused strategies for
specific business units to roll out individual products or services or to guide
specific initiatives. Strategy making at any level offers rich opportunities for
you to hone your leadership skills—by analyzing your unit’s situation, under-
standing different choices for operating within your market, and building
commitment among other people for a particular course of action. Through-
out the process, you also can learn why, when, and how to stick to those
decisions—saying no to initiatives that take your intended strategy off track.
We’ll show you the enduring fundamentals of this practice and then
walk you through six steps of strategy making—from defining a process, to
making decisions and implementing them—so that you can increase your
own leadership impact.
We’ll begin with a recent case of a strategy-making process within a
relatively large organization: how a small team of unit leaders at the Public
Broadcasting Service (PBS) developed, through cycles of adaptive
learning, a strategy for a new 24/7 children’s educational TV channel. The
strategy—which resulted in one of the most successful service launches in
recent PBS history—began as a bottom-up initiative and had to overcome
the initial doubts of PBS’s CEO.

A strategy for a dedicated children’s
channel at PBS

Children’s programming has long been part of PBS’s cultural and educa-
tional mission. But beloved shows such as Sesame Street and Daniel Tiger’s