Leadership and Strategy are inseparable…

I was reading the popular new arrival 'The Strategist' by Cynthia Montgomery of Harvard Business School. It was quite an interesting reading, particularly the concepts that tightly link Leadership and Strategy.

• If you are a leader (or commander in military terms), then you must strategize. You must be the central point of your company's purpose and strategy [Purpose is the reason why your business exists and strategy is the means to achieve the purpose]
• The leader can always take the help of functional or industry experts or even consulting firms while incubating the strategy. But at the end of the day, the leader takes responsibility for the strategy.
• The leader (or CEO practically) is the guardian of the purpose of the organization. That tells Chief Executive Officer is Chief Strategy Officer too.
• Owning the strategy means owning the responsibility. The leader gets the credit or curse because she owns the strategy
• Strategy is never been a finished product, it's a journey that the leader and the organization must live through. If a company thinks the strategy as a product or job (that is, it has a 'finished state' or 'end date') , then the organization will lose its purpose and become irrelevant
• The leader is mindful of the strategy all the time, maps each and every activity in her organization to the strategy, makes subtle (sometimes drastic too) refinements to the strategy continuously.
• The main thing that differentiates a leader and a manager is strategy
• The main thing that differentiates a CEO and a COO is strategy
• Though the leader consults his top team while carving out the strategy, still the leader has a blue print of the strategy on her mind even before calling the team for discussion
• If you are not a strategist, you cannot be the leader
• Concept of 'Super Manager' is a myth. Jack Welch of GE was touted as the 'manager of the century'. He did great things because he was a great strategist too. After he took over he sold close to 100 of GE's businesses because they were not making great margins for GE. He invested the money got through the selling on cutting edge businesses where GE had a definite differentiator.
• Even Steve Jobs is basically a strategist. Though he was celebrated for his technical brilliance and small but refreshing ideas, he was a strategist. As a strategist, he got a few failures and a few successes. Only thing, his successes are really game changing  and path breaking  that took the focus out of his failures.

Nobody likes to work in an organization which doesn't have or doesn't know the purpose. When there is no purpose, there is no strategy too, isn't it?