Is your strategy a slave to your business model?

Have you ever considered how does your existing structure influence your strategy?

Would you say that in your organisation strategy drives structure, or the other way around?

For the sake of discussion, consider strategy in the broadest terms, meaning that it is about achieving specific business objectives in specific ways.

Also, consider structure to refer to how the firm is organised (people, roles, hierarchy, and so on).

Since business model describes how you create, deliver, and capture value, it is a form of structure itself. The question then is, how can you reinvent your own business if you constrain your strategy with the existing one?

In other words, strategy following structure is perfectly fine for doing more of the same. But if you want to create a genuinely new business model, then your strategy needs to be free of the chains of existing structures.

This freedom isn't necessarily all or nothing, but rather a continuum. It's not prudent to give carte blanche to a visionary leader and just let them go wild. There needs to be agreement around the desired outcomes, measures of success, and boundaries.

Pick the right approach for the right job.