Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.
Why Perpetual recommends it
Strategy as Leadership, by Roberto Vassolo and Natalia Weisz, addresses a specific and increasingly common problem: how leaders should set strategy in genuinely adaptive, uncertain environments, where the traditional model of analyse, plan, and execute breaks down because the environment itself keeps shifting faster than a fixed plan can account for.
The authors frame strategic leadership as facing adaptive challenges directly rather than pretending the environment is more stable and predictable than it actually is. Drawing on adaptive leadership theory, they argue that in genuinely uncertain conditions, the leader’s job shifts from having the right answer to building the organisational capacity to sense, learn and adjust quickly as new information arrives.
The book is particularly useful in distinguishing between technical problems, which have a known solution a leader can simply apply, and adaptive challenges, which require new learning and often a genuine change in values, beliefs or habits across the organisation, a distinction many leaders fail to make and pay for later.
This book influences how we frame strategy work with clients operating in genuinely volatile markets, where the discipline isn’t picking the perfect five-year plan, it’s building a strategic process resilient enough to keep adapting as conditions change.
- Traditional analyse-plan-execute strategy breaks down in genuinely adaptive environments
- Adaptive challenges require new learning, not just the application of a known solution
- The leader’s job shifts from having the answer to building the capacity to sense and adjust
- Confusing a technical problem with an adaptive challenge is a common, costly leadership mistake
A useful diagnostic for your current top challenge is asking whether it’s technical, with a known solution to apply, or truly adaptive, requiring new learning across the organisation, since the right response is very different for each.
We give this book three and a half out of five stars.
