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In a 1996 Harvard Business Review article, Michael Porter wrote that “developing a strategy in a newly emerging industry or in a business undergoing revolutionary technological change is a daunting proposition.” But Porter went on to say that he doubts there are really many industries that have or will soon enter “a new era of competition” in which digital technology suspends all of the old rules.

As uncertainty increases, business strategies need more frequent adjustments which in turn requires leaders who excel at timely external and internal alignment. We describe six challenges such leaders need to master.

The six leadership abilities profiled in this article are based on a conceptual model that was pre-tested with selected executives. Using factor analysis and other standard tests of validity, we refined an assessment questionnaire and identified remedies. It has been taken by some 30,000 managers from diverse companies around the world.

Our main findings are that strategic leadership can be deconstructed into more basic elements and that leaders can learn to better practice its skills, habits and attitudes once they know where they are personally weakest. Various challenges complicate better integration of strategy and leadership in the heat of battle but successful leaders conquer these by honing six essential capabilities. These are the ability to anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align and learn. We illustrate each with examples and then provide practical advice for leaders wishing to increase their strategic acumen.

Readers can complete a 12-item assessment online (www.decisionstrat.com).

The skills that comprise strategic leadership in a world of increasing uncertainty should be viewed as a self-reinforcing system. The leadership challenge, which involves practicing six abilities while overcoming barriers to them, allows the best innovators to win the long game while making frequent tactical adjustments along the way in response to surprise and uncertainty.

The field of organization development is fragmented and lacks a coherent and integrated theory and method for developing an effective organization. A 20-year action research program led to the development and evaluation of the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) – a platform by which senior leaders, with the help of consultants, can have an honest, collective, and public conversation about their organization's alignment with espoused strategy and values. The research has identified a syndrome of six silent barriers to effectiveness and a dynamic theory of organizational effectiveness. Empirical evidence from the 20-year study demonstrates that SFP always enables truth to speak to power safely, and in a majority of cases enables senior teams to transform silent barriers into strengths, realign their organization's design and strategic management process with strategy and values, and in a few cases employ SFP as an ongoing learning and governance process. Implications for organization and leadership development and corporate governance are discussed.

The field of organization development is about change and development of organizational systems. One of the major barriers to system change is organizational silence, the fear of lower level to speak truth to power, and senior leaders' reluctance to seek the truth. Consequently, senior leaders whose role is to orchestrate strategic change that will develop the organization's capabilities do not know the whole truth about their system's capabilities to achieve its purpose and strategy and live to its values. Thirty years of enabling leaders to transform their organization through safe honest, collective, and internally public conversations using a structured process called the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) has led to insights about why such conversations are powerfully transformative. After a brief description of the SFP, this chapter describes insights and supporting grounded data about why honest conversations were transformative when leaders fully embrace the practice and spirit of SFP. These insights were gained from facilitating and observing hundreds of honest conversations in progress. The findings have implications for how leaders aided by consultants can accelerate strategic change that will improve effectiveness and performance while simultaneously transforming trust and commitment.

The authors of two new books advise: Throw out your five‐year plan—in an era of relentless change, long‐term planning is futile.

Presents a series of articles on each of the following topics: digital strategy in the next millennium (Digital strategy – a model for the millennium; Searching for the next competitive edge; The technology link; Value web management opportunities; clash of the Titans: communications companies battle for new ground; and a guide through the maze); retailing and distribution in the digital era (The business case for electronic commerce; superdistribution spells major changes; VF Corp. sews up software operation; IBM seeks to harness digital revolution; Egghead’s bold move to a Web‐based strategy; achieving successful Internet banking; and enterprising uses for IT); and the changing shape of the aviation industry (boom times ahead for air cargo; United Airlines flies high through employee ownership; Asian practices to West at Cathay Pacific; and Ryannair strips to the bone).

The purpose of this paper is to present an interview with Professor Michael Porter of Harvard, the noted academic and consultant whose concepts are central to the practice of strategic management, and the answers to questions he is often asked by practitioners who solicit his advice.

For her new book, Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy (2011), award‐winning author Joan Magretta edited this dialog with him which has been adapted for Strategy & Leadership.

Professor Porter delivers warnings on the most common strategy mistakes. When it comes to dealing with disruptive technology, he cautions managers to be sure they have rigorously identified the underlying source of the disruption. On the relentless pressure to find growth, he offers ways to approach it without damaging strategy and profitability. Futhermore he offers advice on managing the planning process itself.

Porter's advice on successful strategic planning: leaders need to bring together the whole team responsible for a particular business, and they need to do the plan together to think about the industry, the competitors, the opportunities, the value chain, and then ultimately make some choices about positioning and direction, and finally, develop the implications for action.

Porter revisits many of his core strategic ideas and gives managers advice on how to apply them to manage effectively in the current dynamic environment.

The purpose of this paper is to address the following question: How do strategy implementation obstacles relate to each other and affect strategy implementation?

The research methodology is qualitative and based on an extensive review of the literature and on an in-depth case study analysis.

This paper draws two main conclusions. The first is that the many obstacles that impact the strategy implementation process can interact and be strongly interrelated in dynamic and complex manners. The second is that obstacles can lead to and reinforce other obstacles, eventually forming long chains of blockages.

Strategy implementation remains a difficult task with improbable success. This paper provides a contribution to an explanation on why so many strategy implementation efforts fail. It is one of the very few papers addressing the issue of the relationships between strategy implementation obstacles.

The purpose of this paper is to assess which communication channels are most frequently used by employees to gain corporate strategic information and the impact of seniority on communication channel chosen.

A Saudi Arabian manufacturing company employing a wide range of both professionals and rank and file workers was used as the source of data. A total of 187 responses (85 per cent response rate) to an empirical questionnaire provided the data for analysis.

There are indications that employees are not satisfied with what they currently know and are eager to learn more about strategic direction. Results also show that rich communication channels such as one‐on‐one dialog and group meetings are preferred to lean ones such as bulletin boards, memos, and newsletters. Finally, more experienced employees utilize a wider variety of communication channels in garnering strategic information.

Findings may not be generalizable to other populations or other companies within the same population.

Practicing managers need to consider the communication sources for strategic information. Further efforts must be made to maximize the communication of strategic intent through the use of rich communication channels for all employees.

Presently there is little research explaining the importance of different communication mechanisms for the transference of strategic information. This research fills that void as it shows the relationship between employee tenure and communication mechanism used to understand strategic direction. This research shows that practicing managers should use rich communication channels (face‐to‐face or group meetings) when communicating strategic intent.

This chapter presents a theory for developing an adaptive high commitment, high performance system of organizing, managing, and leading. It is a synthesis of my 50 years of action and field research presented in my books and articles. It operationalized and makes actionable the ideas of Lewin and systems theorists. Its features are three organizational outcomes that must be achieved simultaneously, features of the system that must be targeted for change, six silent barriers to change, a governance system for continuous learning, change in large complex systems, and elements of a system that needed to immunize it against ultimate destruction.