What the American automakers did with their rubber mallets is a metaphor for how so many people and organizations lead. When faced with a result that doesn’t go according to plan, a series of perfectly effective short-term tactics are used until the desired outcome is achieved. But how structurally sound are those solutions? So many organizations

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Competing priorities surface. We worked with a bank whose leaders insisted they prioritized people even over profits. But we talked to people across the organization, we found the opposite. The leadership had to choose: accept who they really were or make big changes to match their words.

When I looked at my strategy document, I could see a purpose and then a huge jump into leadership and the strategic choices we had made. But where was landscape, climate and doctrine? I started to think back to every business book that I had read. Everything seemed to do this jump from purpose to leadership.