A study of 163 CEOs by Forbes Insights and FD in conjunction with the Association for Strategic Planning and the Council of Public Relations Firms found that nearly a third of all business strategies never reach their mark

Strategy fails to win the hearts and minds where it matters most…throughout the organisation. A company however big or small, cannot successfully implement corporate strategy without employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it. As Louis V. Gerstner, former CEO of IBM once noted, “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game”. As we like to say at Business Insights it is the higher ground, win the higher ground and you will win the game!

At the same time strategy cycles are shortening due to continuous changes in external factors – most now span less than two years making the strategy plan obsolete, making strategy formulation more challenging and time consuming.

What we need to consider is that emerging trends and new phenomena have disrupted strategies since the mid90s, not just now but what is different now is that today’s businesses are disrupting yesterday’s businesses, and tomorrow’s businesses will be disrupted even faster. It is a new era in which the word “disruption” is not as impressive as it once was because it’s happening more often.

The ‘Golden Thread’ is a metaphor for the decisions, data / analytical processes, technology, and human behavior that link strategy and results.

Each bend, twist and cut of the thread reduces the quality of the gold delivered at the end of the process

Seek to disrupt yourself… before it’s too late.

Strategy today is twisted like a golden thread by a growing overload of disruptors. Greater innovation has emerged to cope with the distruptors (agility, thought leadership, flexibility, resilience) but none has exhaustively resolved the problems around strategy. The future of strategy and subsequently any organisation lies on forming a new approach – one that faces profound challenges by combing new ways of thinking with proven practices with a central theme in mind … conceptualisation!