This week we ran our 25th CEO Boot Camp since CEO Connection started in 2005. Great group of CEOs and speakers discussed transformational leadership, stewardship, human capital, and communication. A couple of themes seemed to cross the modules.
The importance of strategy
On one level, everyone knows how important it is to have a clear strategy. What came out this week was the importance of refining it and refining it again to the point of it making real choices. "Both and" strategies are vulnerable. In today's world, if you're not going to be the best at something, your entire enterprise is at risk.
The importance of communicating the strategy
It's not enough for the senior leadership to understand the strategy. Everyone throughout the organization needs to get it so they understand how what they are doing fits into the bigger picture. The risk of your competition understanding your strategy is far outweighed by the downside of your own people not understanding it.
Strategy in action
This can not be a theoretical exercise. The days of selling a strategy to your organization are over. Now, your team must be allowed to discover the strategy and what it means to them through an ongoing series of iterative conversations. Until the strategy is put into action with real milestones and a real rearrangement of priorities and budgets, it won't be real. (Thank you Gary Grates from Edelman).
