Leading a Strategy that Violates Your Own Values

What factors did your organization consider in its last strategy exercise? I suspect they included competitors’ positions, customers’ desires, changing technology, regulation forecasts, structure and resources. Those are the usual inputs consultants and business professors recommend.

Those are all necessary. But there is another input almost every leader overlooks: their personal values.

When I share this advice, the response is, sometimes, incredulity. This happened just this week in a class I taught for mid-career executives from Europe. One participant pointed out that incorporating personal values into strategy seemed to contradict the strategy guru who had taught them previous day that strategy should be "outside-in," based on realities outside the organization, not internal interests.

Please select this link to read the complete article from CEO Magazine.