Strategy and Change

2Implications for Strategy and Leadership

WE'VE ESTABLISHED THAT we're in an era marked by heightened disruptive change. We've also made the case that technology acts as an accelerant. In particular, the last decade (since the mid-2010s) has demonstrated the self-reinforcing and compounding nature of technological change, built on a web of enabling technologies—most notably, hyper-fast mobile computing, the tokenization of payment systems, and the development of generative artificial intelligence. This has created a challenging environment for organizations and leaders, who face difficult decisions on how to drive and sustain performance.

One way to examine the implications of this volatility is to look at specific examples. In our first book, we profiled several well-known organizations and a country that helped us illustrate strategic leadership in practice. The four we featured most prominently are ones you would probably recognize: General Electric (GE), 3M Company, The Walt Disney Corporation, and the nation of South Africa under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. We called these four examples archetypes because they reflected specific, unique attributes of strategy and leadership in practice (we'll get to what those attributes are shortly). Given their prominence at the time, it's worth checking to see how they've fared in the decade since our first book was released.

Table 2.1 “Archetype” Market Capitalization Growth Between 2015 and 2025

Archetype Growth	Benchmark ...