When shifting strategy, don’t lose sight of your long-term vision

That's the Basic Mistake we all do at some stage

How do you do this though? Maybe reminders are a good solution. Using the forest-and-the-trees analogy, we work on the trees on day-to-day basis. The only way to look at the overall forest once in a while is to set regular reminders where we evaluate everything.

Really appreciate the section on responding to social change. That's super relevant to my work in non-profits. Consistency is super important.

This is always a tough line to walk. My mantra is that you CANNOT ever over-communicate why you're making changes to someone's work.

Generally speaking, I think people are understanding that the world of business is complicated. It changes constantly. When they understand why something is being done, it helps a lot.

When they understand the why, they can help with ensuring the how is as successful as possible.

While this appears to be written for larger companies, many of its principles still apply to small teams.

Pivots among a small team might be more readily understood and executed, but if handled poorly they can still be damaging.

"When vision and strategy are at odds, employees, shareholders, and customers may lose confidence that management has a coherent and consistent plan for moving the company forward."

To achieve an alignment between vision and strategy, leaders need to ensure that their short-term strategy changes are consistent and align with the longer-term vision. The big challenges seem to be poor communication — i.e. not sharing why and how — and just resisting pressure to implement new strategies that run counter to a company's vision.

I can say personally with my last company, we did this poorly. Employees were left confused and felt a struggle to live out our company's purpose.

Curious about how founders have navigated these types of conflict or challenges.