Leadership: Strategy Before Self
How you define Strategy? Is Strategy an essential function for a Leader? In the article “Putting Leadership Back Into Strategy,” author Cynthia Montgomery provides historical background information about the topic Strategy and how it aligns with Leadership. Montgomery informs the reader the way we perceive leadership in academia or in the business industry is very grouped. For instance, we have too many segregated units among society to perform multiple tasks at a time. This is how we as a society cultivate the culture of our strategy. Montgomery crafts her position around the emphasis of strategy as a leader and the importance it bears on society as a whole.
In the job industry Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), are defined as a leadership position. The business world, many “moons” ago, used to teach strategy as a part of a course. Strategy produces the plan of action, and as a leader this is a valuable variable to the overall equation. Leadership has a purpose within a group of individuals to act together as a function. This function has to be aligned with a certain strategy in order to execute an operation. Today, people have removed the word and definition of strategy from the function of leadership.
Whether the individual is a student, professor, businessman, or someone who has a leadership position, strategy is valuable to whatever the purpose is of any group to perform the plan of action. In the words of @WinstonChurchil, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
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http://hbr.org/2008/01/putting-leadership-back-into-strategy/ar/1
October 10th, 2012 at 3:53 pm
I recently had to do some research for a paper on philanthropy and I came across an interesting example of leadership in social philanthropy; there is an organization called Resource Generation that brings together young, wealthy people and teaches them how to responsibly use their resources to create positive social change. By doing this they are using the strategy of uniting young people together to become leaders in social justice philanthropy, and their strategy is crucial to the purpose of the organization.