Strategic Clarity, with Kyle Harkema

In this podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Kyle Harkema about his new book, Strategic Clarity. Dr. Kyle Harkema, DBA, MBA, is a distinguished scholar-practitioner with a wealth of experience at the intersection of academia and industry. With an academic foundation built on rigorous study and research, combined with extensive practical experience in the business world, Dr. Harkema epitomizes the modern scholar-practitioner—a professional who not only understands theoretical frameworks but also knows how to apply them in real-world contexts. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:03Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 00

  Kyle Harkema, welcome to the conversation today.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Thanks, John. A pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  It's a pleasure to be with you. You're joining us from Chicago and south of Salt Lake City in Utah. Today, we're going to be talking about your new book, Strategic Clarity, which comes out tomorrow. And I'm just super excited to talk about all things strategy with you, unpack your book a little bit, including the Strategic Orientation Index, which I think is super cool. And yeah, I mean, I think strategy is so important in this day and age. We need to be able to zoom out, think big picture, be able to try to look around the corner a little bit. The world is so messy, it's so complex, and it seems to only be getting more so. And so, the clarity piece, I think, is also just

• 1:22Speaker 00

  so vital and so important. So, I'm thrilled to have the chance to sit down and talk with you about your new book. As we get started, I wanted to share Kyle's bio with everybody. Dr. Kyle Harkema is distinguished scholar-practitioner with a wealth of experience at the intersection of academia and industry with an academic foundation built on rigorous study and research. Combined with extensive practical experience in the business world, Dr. Harkema epitomizes the modern scholar-practitioner, a professional who not only understands theoretical frameworks, but also knows how to apply them in real-world contexts. And let me just say, I love the scholar-practitioner framing and approach. That's something I aspire to myself, you

• 2:07Speaker 00

  know, as a professor and as a consultant. Uh, you know, that's kind of the world that I try to swim in. Also, I think we need more of that. We need, we need both informing the other, right? And so I appreciate your orientation. I appreciate your efforts. And welcome again to the conversation. Before we launch on in, anything you would like to share with the audience about your own background, your own kind of personal context? Uh, and then we'll start chatting about the book.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think John, you nailed it. Um, and I just want to echo that, yeah, I think we need more scholar practitioners to help bridge the divide between, between theory and practice. So love that we're swimming in the same lane.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, the bridging the divide and also, I mean, there are so many books out there, right? There are so many books on leadership, on strategy, on management, on all these different topics. And I mean, they all have their own place and they all have their own nuggets of wisdom and whatnot. Um, very few of them are particularly well grounded in like data and theory. And so, you know, they may be anecdotally, you know, valuable and they may, you know, have their own kind of nuggets of wisdom, but uh, I really, when I find one that is grounded in like good research, grounded in good theoretical frameworks.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  I really appreciate it. Uh, that is also written in a way that's accessible to like the general population that's written in an accessible way. So that everyday business leaders can, you know, use it and better their organizations. Uh, it's, it's kind of a rarity and, and you know, that's what, that you, what you're achieving with your book. And, and so I think that's a great feat.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, that was certainly the aim. Uh, absolutely. And, and I agree with you. It's just a matter of um, applying that rigor and then making that rigor approachable. Uh, so that your, your practitioners will say, okay, that makes sense. They don't necessarily need to read the academic journals and understand all the theory, but I'm following and I can make my business better as a. Result. That's what I was trying to do.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, one, one thing I always like to ask authors is why this book? Why now? Um, you know, tons of books out there. Uh, clearly, you know, you have a strong background in the area. Um, but why now? Like, you probably could have written this before. Perhaps you could have done it later. Um, yeah, what was it about this, you know, that, that, that just kind of pulled you towards it? Because these are a labor of love. They take a lot of time and energy, a lot of blood, sweat and tears.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, why now? That's a great question. And I think for me, it was really about taking all of the work. Uh, you know this, uh, we share having gone through a doctoral process together. You spend years, uh, earning that degree and really deep in study and advancing new knowledge. And for me, having a foot in academia and a foot in practice, I felt like I wasn't bridging that divide as well as I could. And you spend so much time learning about a particular area. I really felt like the next step for me after a dissertation is how do I make that dissertation useful to the practitioner?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Um, because for me, uh, being a practitioner, there really wasn't a whole lot out there. And that is why I wrote it and why I wrote it now.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's, that's great. And yeah, again, the bridge, the connection, um, translation of, of like rigorous academic work into, into the workplace. All of that I think is, is super, super important, super admirable. Um, in the book, again, title Strategic Clarity, you say that most business strategies fail. Uh, I don't think that's anything new, but you, you talk about how they fail silently. Uh, and that struck me. So, well, like, what do you mean by that? That they fail silently?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, thank you. So I think a lot of leaders think that strategy failure looks dramatic, right? Love revenue collapse or layoffs, market share loss, but.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  What I found over the course of my leadership career as well as my research journey is that strategy failure usually is much quieter than that. It starts with subtle execution friction and departments start drifting apart in how they interpret priorities. Initiatives may lose momentum or decisions get relitigated. And leaders get frustrated because they feel like they're saying the same thing over and over again. And an example, I think a lot of executives listening will recognize this feeling. You leave for an offsite or a leadership meeting and everybody's aligned. Everybody agrees, the direction is clear, the energy is high.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Fast forward three months later, it feels like different parts of the organization are moving in completely different directions. Marketing is moving one way, operations another, sales is frustrated. And then leadership is stuck asking, why are we struggling to gain traction when the strategy seems so obvious? The energy was so high. And what I found is the issue is not necessarily the strategy itself. The issue is that the organization is no longer behaviorally aligned behind it. So why I say strategy often dies silently or dies in behavior is because that behavioral drift happens long before the financial consequences fully show up in the organization.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like, how do you, how do you start to like thwart that? Like, if you're aware that strategies tend to fail silently. I guess awareness is the first step. So then, then what? Like, what's, what's the next thing that you start to try to do? So that you don't fall prey to that same kind of common issue?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Sure, so I think one thing I would say is by assuming that alignment is not equal to agreement. So a lot of times leaders will leave a meeting and everyone feels that the direction is solidified. Nobody objected, we're all good. And what actually happens then is different departments take and interpret that strategy through their own functional lenses. And over time, the strategy diverge behaviorally. And because that drift happens gradually. Organizations really normalize it until execution, they don't normalize it until it becomes

• 9:05Speaker 01

  noticeably difficult, right? And there's a pain point that needs to be addressed.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And so I think you've talked about some of those warning signs, strategies breaking down inside the organization. Perhaps this leads to something I teased in the introduction. So you have in the book, you have something called the Strategic Orientation Index, or the SOI. And perhaps this is a tool, I think, that organizations can use, leaders can use, that can be helpful to spot, you know, these silent strategic failures. Talk us through this a little bit, like, what is it? How can it help leaders see the types of things they're usually missing?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, so SOI helps leaders see the behavioral system that's undergirding their execution. And what I found is most organizations are really good at measuring outcomes, right? Revenue, profitability, customer retention, so on and so forth. But they're rarely measuring whether teams are aligned and how they're thinking, how they're listening to the market, how they're acting operationally. And SOI was designed to make those patterns visible. And something interesting that I want to clarify at the outset, because it's important. The point is not to tell the people how to do their jobs. We're not telling engineers how to engineer, or salespeople how to sell.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  The question is higher than that. Are the functions reinforcing the same strategic posture? And let me give you an example. Let's say an organization realizes it wants to move toward what I call fearless inventor posture, which is being more entrepreneurially oriented. The issue may be that the company is moving too slowly. Too many decisions require too many approvals. So people may technically have authority, but behaviorally, they're still waiting for permission before acting. So in that case, the work is not telling the teams exactly what decision to make. It's clarifying decision posture.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  So more asking, where do we need faster experimentation organizationally? Where do we have too many handoffs? Where do we have unclear ownership? And where organizationally do we need tolerance for calculated risk? So that creates coherence, not micromanagement. So leadership is not saying, here's how to do your job. Leadership is saying, here's the kind of strategic behavior that this moment, that this context requires of us organizationally. So that's what SOI does, is it makes those inconsistencies in your organization visible before they become a major execution problem.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'm, I'm, I'm trying to think a little bit more about, so you have inconsistencies. That, I mean, every organization has them, right? Every team has them. So leaders are always grappling with trying to create a consistent culture, trying to, trying to create systems that allow for people to perform at peak levels within a safe environment. They're always trying to create a, a, a place where, where, you know, you can, you can achieve, you know, the, the, the KPIs, the desired outcomes, but you have, you know, you have policies, practices, and procedures that sometimes get in the way.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  You have, we're humans, you have human foibles and human issues that get in the way. You have all these different inconsistencies, all these different things that, that just like are gums in the works, right? That get in the way, that cause, that cause the, these, these types of issues. And so give us some some like elements of the strategic orientation index like that that you're measuring. That you know, to help help us think through like what what are the types of things that that that you're systematizing? Because I think we all we all know that they're there. And and I think a lot of leaders spend a good chunk of their time each and every day.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Putting out fires, trying to deal with them, right? And maybe it sounds even almost, maybe it sounds almost unbelievable to people to think, oh, I could actually. Proactively like deal with these before they come make become major problems.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, John, the thing that you said, which is interesting is culture, right? I've heard that a lot and SOI is a little bit different than culture. Culture is part of the environment, right? But SOI really is. Specifically focused around strategic behavior, right? Or as I call them, the orientations. So culture in my mind describes values and norms more broadly within the organization. But SOI is measuring specific things to your to your question. How do organizations think about opportunity and risk? How are organizations listening to their customers and to their markets?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  And how consistently are the organizations? Executing decisions under pressure, right? So in many ways, culture is the overarching environment. And SOI is measuring the execution patterns that are happening within the organization.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Okay, so the ex the execution piece specifically. So let's let's talk a little bit more about some of the things that you have seen. You know, as you've used the SOI within organizations like what? But you know, I'm sure there are things that you're expecting to see, but there's probably things that you were surprised by. As you started to measure, because as you as you've used it across a range of types of organizations, you know, different. Industries, etc.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I love that question. So for me, what surprised me is how often leadership teams believe that alignment existed because the strategy had been communicated clearly.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  And honestly, I get it. I understand why. I've been a part of these leadership teams. We spend exorbitant amounts of time building strategic plans, running the offsites, communicating the priorities to the organization and aligning. But once we start measuring the behavior across the organization, we found that different departments and different layers of leadership are interpreting the strategy very differently. So some teams view the organization as highly innovative, while some are viewing it as risk averse. Some are viewing it as customer oriented, while others are viewing it as really internally focused. So I think what surprised me is

• 16:11Speaker 01

  how much leadership didn't understand the interpretation that's happening as it goes across departments and as it grows down to middle management and to frontline. There's what leadership says, but then there's what middle management hears, and then there's what frontline employees operationalize. And those are often not identical. You know, the communication is happening, but alignment isn't. And that's really the distinction and one of the foundational insights of the book is how do we bubble up these orientations so that they're visible?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  And once they're visible, we can create systems to make sure that we're aligning to the type of orientation that we believe our industry context demands of the organization.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, any, any other like, it's, it's so fascinating to me because every organization is, is so unique, like as I've worked as a consultant with different organizations, you know, there's always the temptation. You know, when, when you, when you see, it doesn't matter how similar that an organization may seem. It could be the same industry. It could be relatively the same size, same kind of general. Stage of of growth, development, um same general kind of niche like there there you could check so many boxes of how this this organization is so similar to other organizations you've worked with in the past, but every organization is different, right?

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Every organization has its own unique context, its own unique history, its own unique people. Um, and so uh every every organization is unique and you know, that sounds obvious, but I can't tell you how many times, you know, I have to relearn that lesson over and over and how many times I think other consultants have to relearn that over and over. Um, and so as you're as you as you're, you know, going into organizations, not only, you know, seemingly probably similar organizations, but vastly different organizations, um, you know, like maybe, you know, I did additional like types of like just dramatic like differences that you see um as as you're applying this kind of an approach to like the the implementation of strategy.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Uh, and and the challenges that organizations are facing.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Well, I I love that you drew that out, John, because that's one of the things that when people are engaging with my framework and with my work, they're asking themselves where, well, is there a best quadrant? Right? Or should we all try to be upper right, uh, which would be visionary vanguard, which means high in both entrepreneurial orientation and market orientation? Sure, you could say that, but ultimately there's industry fit conditions. And that's where when when we say, do you want, you know, different levels of market or entrepreneurial orientation? What is your industry? What is your organizational culture?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Um, you know, who are your employees? Do you have a lot of people who tend to be more entrepreneurial or less uh on your staff? So there definitely needs to be not only an industry fit, but also an organizational fit with the posture that you're trying to drive toward. So I love that you're drawing that out because that's Very much what we need to discuss when I'm working with organizations in terms of, okay, what is our ideal posture? Because it's not what is the ideal posture? It is what is our ideal posture? And that's a very good question.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, so much to think about here. I think the it's so fascinating to me, the world of strategy, the world of of complex organizations, just in how we're navigating in within so much complexity, so much disruption, so much ambiguity. We've only scratched the surface here, but thankfully you have a wonderful book that people can get and start to dig through and to unpack more and more of this. I know at the time I need to let you go and get on with your busy day, but before we wrap things up for today, I wanted to give you a chance to share with the audience how they can connect with you, find out more about your work, where they can find your book, and then give us the final word for today.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Thank you so much for for having me. And you can find me at kylejharcoma.com or connect with me on LinkedIn. I regularly share insights about strategy, execution, organizational alignment, and the behavioral side of leadership. And if you're a leader listening to this podcast and you feel like your execution has become more difficult than it should be inside your organization, there's information on my website for you to learn from and reach out to me. And I think for a closing thought, I really want leaders listening to this to rethink where your strategy actually lives. We build it in decks, in plans, and in offsites.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  But ultimately, our strategy needs to live in the behavior of everyone in our organization and how we think about opportunity and risk, about our customer and markets, and how we execute under pressure. Because how we're behaving is how our strategy comes to life.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Awesome. Well said. Well said. This has just been a real pleasure, Kyle. I appreciate all of your thoughts. I appreciate the opportunity to sit down with you. I encourage the audience to reach out, get connected, find out more about what Kyle can do for you. Check out the book. And as always, I hope everyone can stay healthy and safe, that you can find meaning and purpose at work each and every day. And I hope you all have a great week.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Thanks for joining us for this episode of the podcast. We hope you stay healthy and safe, and please join us again soon.