By now you should have a good appreciation for the need for strategic conversations, and an understanding of how organizations employ them to gain a leg up. This chapter’s focus is on you, the leader, and what you need to do to deliver on the promise of strategic conversations: strengthening decision-making under uncertainty, promoting an entrepreneurial workforce, and accelerating growth. It will provide guidance – a recipe – for developing business models in the strategic conversations way. But before we delve into the process, we’ll address how leadership is different under strategic conversations and how you need to comport yourself to be successful.

These lessons apply whether you have a position on the org chart that bestows authority, or whether you find yourself somewhere at the bottom of the pyramid. Neither of these circumstances determines your ability to lead. As we saw at the World Bank, a secretary far from its Washington DC headquarters was able to provide the catalyst for a change that radically altered the business model of a hidebound institution. The opposite is also true: just because you have a leadership title doesn’t make you a leader. We’ve all seen high-ranking people abdicate their leadership potential by playing it safe and doing what is politically expedient.