Integrating Personal and Enterprise Strategy
Full Stack Leadership and the discipline of developing a teachable point of view
In my February 25th post, “What is Your Leadership Strategy?” I addressed the problem of exhaustion or “burnout,” pointing to a misalignment of purpose, values, strategy, and time allocation. I also raised the idea of articulating your core philosophy to clarify your personal strategy and connect it to the enterprise strategy in a way that can be shared and scaled. This is not my original idea. I learned it years ago from Noel Tichy’s book, The Leadership Engine. In particular, Tichy’s description of the work he and his team (which included my friend and colleague Bob Marcus) conducted at GE’s famed Crotonville Leadership Institute. The luster of Jack Welch’s approach to developing and selecting executive talent has dulled a bit since GE itself lost its way. Welch’s successor, Jeff Immelt, was forced to resign, and other GE-alumni CEOs were pushed out at places like Boeing and Home Depot. So it may seem odd to resurface an approach that produced such high-profile failures. I believe that these failures are at least in part explained by the leadership styles of the people involved, more than the process.
A key idea in Tichy’s book is that leaders teach. To teach, they must first understand what they think, believe, and do as leaders. They must convert tacit knowledge into explicit, sharable ideas, principles, and methods. I think of this as one’s leadership philosophy. Tichy called it a “Teachable Point of View.”
Crafting a Teachable Point of View
As I understand this idea, it begins with articulating your theory of success for the business you are leading. It could also include your theory of success for any business. To me, this idea of a grand unified theory of business goes a little too far, so I prefer to limit the frame to the business you are in and the one you know best. A theory of success strikes me as very close to Drucker’s theory of the business, as well as Roger Martin’s Strategy Choice Cascade. A theory of success must answer a few questions, such as:
What business are we in?
Whom do we serve (and explicitly do not serve)?
What value do we distinctively provide (which competitors cannot in the same way)?
Which capabilities do we own that permit us to capture and sustain our position?
What do we do to sustain and improve our position?
Quoting Drucker, “The question, ‘what business are we in?’ is not as easy to answer as it might seem; and it evolves and changes as a consequence of success as well as changes in the marketplace.”1
We think it should be obvious what our business is. In practice, it is not that straightforward. The world does not stand still. You may think you are in the business of providing software as a service (SaaS) to a broad range of businesses when along come Large Language Models that enable your customers to “vibe code” the development of their own bespoke systems - faster, cheaper, and customized to their specific needs. It turns out you were in the business of helping customers achieve the results they were trying to deliver to their own customers, in part through your SaaS platform. Now they can do that better without you. You were selling drill bits when customers wanted holes. Regularly engaging the question is an ongoing dialogue among senior leaders and diverse thinkers within and beyond the company
Underpinning any theory of success is a set of values. These guide the behaviors and actions that people in various roles throughout your delivery system must take to produce results. Values are not just what is espoused and printed on a poster or a website. Values-in-use constitute the actual shared motivations of the community of people within your organization that drive action. An organization is a human system. A useful and teachable point of view contains an understanding of people, what they care about, and what they do when no one is watching. Some leaders think people are essentially bad and must be controlled (Theory X). Other leaders think people are fundamentally good and want to do their best and ought to be empowered to learn, grow, and act freely within a framework of agreements (Theory Y). Depending on your theory of people, you will also have your theory of motivation. Leading involves generating and harnessing energy for coordinated action. Being able to describe what you do to create energy for yourself and for other people is a key element.
The last part of Tichy’s approach he called “Edge.” By this, I take it that he means the way you make decisions under pressure. When the situation calls for a hard choice, whether related to money or to people, what do you do? How do you approach it? These are times when your theory of success, your values, and your way of creating energy come together in action. These situations are often highly visible and reveal consistency of character.
Connecting the Layers
Crafting your teachable point of view is a process of reaching outward toward the front end of the stack (your stakeholders and competitors), looking inward to your back end (data, experience, wisdom, and character), and making clear and explicit the middleware (principles and heuristics) that connect these domains. It may start as an independent exercise, you on your deck with a notebook or a laptop. It cannot remain one and have any significant impact on your enterprise. To do that, it must become a shared effort involving your team, their teams, and ultimately the whole community of leaders in your enterprise. Your theory of success is just that...a theory. It’s an informed theory to be sure, but it is not “The Truth.” Even if it were (or if there were such a thing), it would matter little if no one connected with it.
You connect the layers, first within yourself, then with your team, and then with the whole organization. You do this by engaging in open, candid, vulnerable dialogue, knowing that other intelligent, thoughtful, experienced leaders will see things differently and challenge your assumptions. That’s what you want. It is through this robust, rigorous, generous, ongoing exchange of ideas that your point of view evolves into an aligned understanding of “how we win together.” In this process, deference to authority is poison. Courage to speak up is gold. Listening for the unexpected is key.
Creating the conditions for this sort of conversation will be the subject of an upcoming post.
I invite you to join the conversation and to share your thoughts.
Drucker, P. F. (2001). The essential Drucker: The best of sixty years of Peter Drucker's essential writings on management. HarperCollins.