The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

The leader who turned the culture into a system was Helmuth von Moltke the elder, who fostered high levels of autonomy and worked out how to simultaneously achieve high alignment.

toward making them flexible is to create an operating rhythm with quarterly reviews of progress, in which adjustment is expected and the budget is a treated as a rolling forecast.

Such a model will only work if people are competent and share basic values.

Day-to-day practice is in part determined by organizational processes, most importantly budgeting and performance management. They should themselves be aligned with the strategy, and using a briefing cascade to link them all together is a practical way of achieving this. They should also enable rather than inhibit adaptation.

The intelligence of an organization is never equal to the sum of the intelligence of the people within it

management

The concept of friction is entirely consistent with systems thinking and chaos theory, but it is more useful to managers because it describes how working in a complex adaptive system is experienced. Its elements can be seen and felt, so we can more easily work out how to deal with them.

His answer to the knowledge gap was to limit direction to defining and expressing the essential intent; he closed the alignment gap by allowing each level to define what it would achieve to realize the intent; and he dealt with the effects gap by giving individuals freedom to adjust their actions in line with intent.

A strategy is not in itself a plan, but prepares the organization for the future by providing it with a framework for decision making, based on some basic choices about how to compete.