This week’s newsletter captures my reflections and the key insights from my chat with Mike Jones about mainstream strategy and leadership. Mike states that the mainstream approach to strategy has become performative and detached from organizational reality. He argues business schools and social media encourage “magic wand” leadership, while many Silicon Valley firms centralize decisions, remove agency, and then blame people for their collective failure.
Drawing on Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model, POSIWID, and Self-determination theory, he emphasizes autonomy, decision rights, resources, and intent so teams can self-organize and adapt.
Ultimately, he suggests that leaders must stop treating strategy as a marketing exercise and instead focus on co-creating structures that allow for genuine responsiveness to the environment.
A MUST WATCH for all Silicon Valley executives.
“The purpose of a system is what it does. There is after all no point in claiming its purpose to be something it continuously fails to do”
Podcast Video
Members of the Cyb3rSyn Community can watch/discuss the podcast episode on the www.cyb3rsynlabs.com portal or the mobile app (iOS and Android). The video is also on YouTube here 👇🏾
Key Insights and My Reflections
Mike’s journey into systems thinking is nothing short of extraordinary. After serving 18 years in the military and facing the harsh realities of operations in Afghanistan, he realized he wanted to understand why people followed his lead. Astonishingly, at 28 years old, Mike taught himself to read by poring over leadership books, eventually teaching himself cognitive psychology and earning a master's degree.
His autodidactic transition from the military into civilian consultancy led him to a stark realization: Corporate strategy is fundamentally broken. He discovered Patrick Hoverstadt and Lucy Loh's works starting with Patterns of Strategy, which helped him connect the missing links in how strategy is applied in the civilian world.
Here are the key insights and my reflections from our conversation…
POSIWID: The Purpose of a System Is What It Does
The Agency Gap: How Centralization Creates the "Unaccountability Machine"
Strategy is a Verb: Returning to Terrain, Enemy, and Forces
The Marketing Hijack: Beware the "Greek Villa"
The Perceptual Fail: Why Strategy Breaks Before the First Step
Reality First, Aspiration After