management blog

We need to talk about strategy.

Now there’s a sentence guaranteed to crush the spirit of any senior management team. But business leaders ought to recognise, as they catch their breath after months of turbulence, that the strategy they were pursuing until recently is unlikely to be right for today.

It’s not just that markets have changed. Your organisation has changed. You may have all been through a near-death experience. Even if you avoided calamity, it is unlikely that colleagues are the same carefree people you remember from a year or two ago. Most businesses have been making serious cutbacks. Co-workers may be doing their best to look calm and positive. But they can see unemployment rising and know that sustained recovery is a long way off.

So, before even attempting to work out a strategy for changed times, leaders first need to acknowledge that their people feel differently about the jobs they are doing. This is not the same thing as bland reassurance, however. Virginia Merritt, managing partner of the London-based consultancy Stanton Marris, said last week: “One company chairman asked me: ‘How can I convince them that things will get back to the way they were before?’ I had to tell him that this was not the right way to come at the problem.”

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