Page 68 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

58 HBR Leader’s Handbook

expand market share against financial competitors. General Stanley Mc-
Chrystal’s mission when he took over the Joint Special Operations Com-
mand in Iraq was to slow the terrorism of Al Qaeda; he was working toward
a vision of establishing a more peaceful Iraq and Afghanistan that wouldn’t
harbor terrorists. The strategic goal he set was to kill or capture as many
Al Qaeda leaders as possible.
A good strategy should aspire to achieve a limited number of relevant
goals that stakeholders of the organization can easily understand; it should

Check in on your vision

Because great strategy flows from vision, early on you’ll need to check in
on your team’s and your organization’s bigger pictures of success. This is
where the vision practice comes into play. If your team doesn’t have a
clear aspiration to rally around, you can’t do the strategy work to reach
that kind of success: if you’re not clear about your destination, how can
you choose any particular approach to get there? Clarity about your des-
tination should also enable you to think more wisely about the different
routes you ought to consider.
You must also ask yourself about your deeper motivation: is the de-
sire for a new strategy really a desire for a new vision, too? Be honest.
Sometimes, a team’s vision does need refreshing or altering; that may
become clear only as you start to develop a new strategy.
Because vision and strategy are so closely related—“where we want
to get to, how we will do it”—they often evolve in tandem. If you feel you
have to develop (or newly develop) a vision together with strategy, don’t
let the dual process become an endless loop or have your strategy force
a larger change of purpose than the organization really needs. In the end,
vision should be broad and durable enough to benefit from different
strategies in different situations. As markets, technology, and compet-
itive situations change, you may well need to develop new strategies to
achieve the same picture of success embodied in your vision.