Well, most of the time, faulty leadership and bad hierarchies fail to construct coherent strategies. But, strategy is supposed to be the guiding lead to a whole organization’s activities. A good quality strategy implementation has clear goals in mind and can be used to elaborate clear and concise mission statements for all the functional parts of the organization. A “focus on resilience” can be translated into many things at an operational level, but it’s way too vague at an strategic level. Why do they want to be more resilient? is the appropriate counter questioning here. Better serve customers, how? Why key player?

It’s different from “focus on production resilience to respond to customers regardless of adverse market circumstances”. That is more actionable. It’s part of the strategic responsibilities of middle management to translate that into tactical operational actions and communicating them to individual staff. For example, product design can create redundant packaging alternatives that use different levels of different materials, so shipping can respond to material shortages without incurring too much delay. Logistics can call for cache storage of production critical materials. Then factory can come up with the production plans for each packaging alternative and a contingency plan in case of shortages. Then acquisitions can scout ahead of time the different vendors for materials that would be required. Finance has to come up with a plan to finance the new storage caches. Marketing and sales can come up with reward plans to compensate customers on delays, and advertisement messages that spin negative circumstances into positives, etc. This is just one possible line of actions, out of infinite possibilities depending on industry, product and structure.

That’s a well formed strategy. Now, just giving a hollow presentation to an all hands meetings is not the most efficient way of communicating but yet again, a lot of incompetents make it into management without having a damn clue of what is their job.

I will say I went from a place that had these meetings to one that doesn’t. It’s more concerning when leadership doesn’t seem to have any plan at all, even if the plan is “do a good job and sell this much of this thing”.

It means someone way up the ladder fucked everything up, and now they want you to work twice as hard for the same amount of money but they want to spin it to sound like something they intended to do all along and they want you to believe it’s somehow a good thing for you as well.

I’d say their main goal is to keep managers busy with something to prevent them from hindering work that needs to be done to keep the place running. ;)

Creating it is a job to give someone they want to promote. It gives them visibility with a large amount of management and tells that management that this person is moving up. The resulting whatever becomes a thing managers can then use to justify just about any decision they make. It is also used for countless hours of meeting where the real goal is for the “leadership” to advertise how important they are. I shit you not, the company I worked at previously had full on film crews with makeup professions make glamor videos of direct level folks talking about it like they were imparting wisdom from the ages.

I’m now working in a large corporation for the first time ever, so I’m not sure if anything makes sense.

But if I were running a big organization, my reason for communicating overall strategy to everyone in the organization would be to ensure they have context they need to make decisions themselves, as opposed to always needed to seek guidance from their boss.

Nobody in management wants to admit the truth: the corporation exists to further enrich its already wealthy owners. That sort of mission statement, however accurate, isn’t going to inspire anybody to buy into the corporate culture, let alone put in unpaid overtime by working more than 40 hours a week on a salary.