The Organisation with Resolve

A few years ago I watched a good strategy die, and I can tell you the day of the week it happened. It was a Tuesday. A capable board had done the strategy work properly, then a tight quarter arrived, an old customer waved a substantial cheque, and the plan was "parked" for a quarter. Eighteen months later the strategy still existed in the way the good china exists, much admired and never used. Nothing was wrong with the strategy. What failed was the holding.

This is the third book in the series, and it climbs to the top floor. The first dealt with the leader, the second with the team. This one is about the organisation itself and the strategy it claims to be following. It is written for a problem the strategy shelf largely ignores. The making of strategy is taught superbly elsewhere, and the book points readers to the people who teach it best. Far less is written about holding one: what happens in month four, when the numbers tighten, the strategy starts to cost something, and a series of small decisions quietly settles whether it lives.

The first part shows how strategies actually fail. Almost never by decision. They get nibbled to death by reasonable exceptions, each with its own respectable business case, and the erosion runs through a recognisable cascade. It also insists on the question I regard as the most valuable in the book: when alignment fractures, are you failing to hold a sound strategy, or holding an unsound one beautifully? An organisation can march in perfect step off a cliff, and discipline measures never check the direction of march. The second part turns the five disciplines onto the strategy itself. Your strategy is your budget, and the ledger tells the truth the deck won't. Honest metrics and kill criteria keep the design tested. Held noes keep it chosen. Decisions run fast on the reversible and deliberate on the irreversible, and the golden thread ties every task in the building back to purpose. The final part builds the machinery that makes the holding permanent: a strategic operating system, a flywheel, a maturity model and a governance Standard that outlives whoever signs it.

I ran these failures personally for twenty years, and I am building my current business as a working proof of the remedy, breakages included. The commitment the book asks for fits in two sentences. Our strategy makes sense, and we will hold it. When it stops making sense, we will say so first, and change it in the open.