Page 62 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

52 HBR Leader’s Handbook

beat you at the same game. Find the right strategic sweet spot and you can
win too.

The process of strategy

Of course, strategies sometimes fail (even spectacularly, as famous case
studies will attest). Your growth as a leader must be built not just on suc-
cesses but also on learning from your setbacks. Strategy making will pro-
vide plenty of those, too, along the way. Don’t shrink from the challenges.
But as a rising leader, you should also understand why strategies fail.
Two common pitfalls are:

• Incorrectly assessing an external market situation or misjudging
an internal capability needed for the strategy—or both

• Being surprised by a trend that suddenly changes the game of your
business—for example, a new technology or unforeseen competitor
that arises

In today’s dynamic global economy, such risks are increasingly com-
mon. You should do your best to minimize those risks, but even the savviest
strategists can still get caught off guard.
The practice of strategy is changing as leaders more deliberately at-
tempt to hedge against failure and adapt more nimbly to changing circum-
stances. The lengthy, internally focused planning processes of yore have
given way to much more flexible, outward-facing, short-cycle, and learn-
as-one-goes-along approaches—reflecting the mindset and so-called lean
methods seen in many Silicon Valley startups. (This kind of thinking was
epitomized in Steve Blank’s HBR article “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes
Everything,” but the concepts were introduced earlier in Rita Gunther
McGrath and Ian Macmillan’s 1995 HBR article “Discovery-Driven Plan-
ning.”) A lean approach may seem more informal and practical, but it is not
without its own structure and logic. Great leaders still follow a deliberate
and structured problem-solving process to identify critical choices and de-
velop decisions to shape their strategies. And so should you.