How a strategic framework is really built

A year of executive dialogue, from refresh to commitment

Many organizations feel busy, ambitious, and strategically active, yet strangely short on direction. That tension is not accidental.

Studies have shown that three in four employees expect their leaders to paint a compelling picture of the future, while only a tiny fraction of leadership time is actually spent on visioning. As James M. Kouzes and Barry Posner observed in Harvard Business Review, the gap between expectation and practice is striking.

When leaders do turn to vision and strategy, there is another trap. As Jim Collins once warned, many strategy statements dissolve into a muddled stew of values, goals, purposes, and aspirations that elicit a polite but deadly response: “True, but who cares?”

This article describes how a leadership team avoided both traps. What began as a limited refresh of a strategic framework turned into a year-long sequence of executive dialogues that rebuilt coherence between ambition, purpose, values, and strategy, and prepared the ground for activation.

The case is deliberately sanitized. The intent is not to showcase outcomes, but to show the process. What the work actually looked like, step by step, and why that matters.

Situation: when success creates fragmentation

Two years before the formal start of the initiative, a series of interviews with senior leaders revealed a pattern that will sound familiar to many organizations.

Three themes stood out.

First, people struggled to see a coherent overall direction. Many initiatives made sense individually, but they did not add up. As a result, leaders and teams found it hard to understand why certain things were happening and how their work contributed to the bigger picture.

Second, there was an unresolved tension between global direction and local ownership. The issue was not centralization versus decentralization, but the absence of a designed interdependence between the two.

Third, people were vocal about what was not working, yet did not see a clear way to improve it. Dissatisfaction existed without agency.

None of this reflected a lack of talent or commitment. It reflected the side effects of success over time. Strategy had grown organically. Complexity had accumulated faster than coherence.

Executive Dialogue 1

A refresh, not a reinvention

The formal journey started with a briefing involving the CEO, CHRO, and a small group of executives. The initial intent was modest: update the existing strategic framework for today’s realities, sharpen priorities, and improve embedding.

Purpose and values were assumed to be largely out of scope.

At the same time, parallel work was underway on the employee value proposition. That work was generating energy around a more emotional articulation of purpose and clearer behavioral signals. A tension was already present, even if not yet explicit.

Executive Dialogue 2

Securing mandate and agreeing how to work

Before any diagnostics or content work, the full Executive Team aligned on whether and how to proceed. This meeting was a governance moment. Leaders explicitly committed to updating the strategic framework and agreed on the approach. Parallel initiatives were acknowledged rather than ignored, including the EVP work and website refresh.

Crucially, the team agreed to test assumptions before locking scope. Purpose and values would be revisited if evidence warranted it.

Executive Dialogue 3

Listening before deciding

Two things happened in parallel.

First, a company-wide survey explored how the existing framework, purpose, and values were actually lived. Second, individual Executive Team interviews surfaced strategic reflections.

The employee input was candid.

“Purpose and values do not live in my region.”

“Our values hang on a wall, they do not live.”

“The purpose feels cold. Resonance was not tested.”

At the same time, people pointed to moments of real energy, particularly where the company’s brands connected emotionally with consumers.

Executive interviews added another layer. Ambition felt numerically clear but emotionally thin. Growth needed a clearer logic. Strategy required sharper choices.

The reaction was uncomfortable, but accepted. Two decisions followed.

Purpose and values were brought explicitly into scope. And the strategic core, where to play and how to win, would need more clarity and consequence.

Executive Dialogue 4

From insight to standards and deliberate choice

Rather than jumping to wording, the team first defined what “good” needed to look like for key elements within the strategic framework.

Values needed to help leaders solve real dilemmas, not decorate walls.

Ambition needed to inspire directionally without simulating false precision.

Strategy needed to make trade-offs visible.

Two interventions proved decisive.

First, a simple portfolio view showed where money was actually made across markets and categories. Concentration and dispersion became undeniable.

Second, the team introduced the granularity of growth framework. This was not an analytical intervention, but a deliberate structuring device to enable a more meaningful strategic conversation. It provided a common language to discuss different types of growth, different sources of value creation, and where disproportionate investment might be warranted.

At the same time, the team surfaced its key dilemmas. Not problems to be solved, but tensions to be reconciled. The logic was simple: real breakthroughs come from through-thinking, not compromise. Classic examples illustrate the point. Apple improved function through design and design through function. IKEA achieved good design through low price and low price through design.

The same lens was applied internally.

Purpose, taken seriously

Purpose deserved a pause.

As Peter Drucker famously noted, neglecting purpose is a root cause of business frustration and failure. The team therefore resisted the temptation to jump straight to wording. Instead, the work combined three lenses:

1. Inside-out authenticity, through history and founding intent.

2. Outside-in resonance, through the positive impact brands have in consumers’ lives.

3. Employee energy, through deep analysis of qualitative engagement survey responses, including answers to the question: what do you enjoy most about working here?

   
   

Patterns aligned across all three. The same human truths that resonated with consumers also gave employees pride and energy.

Purpose was not invented. It was distilled.

Executive Dialogue 5

From framework to distinctiveness

Portfolio analyses went deeper. Growth versus margin. Relative market share versus profitability. Country by country, category by category.

The discussion became specific and uncomfortable, in a productive way.

Another insight emerged through feedback from regional teams. While the granularity of growth framework was appreciated for its clarity, it risked becoming generic and overly exhaustive if translated mechanically.

The response was decisive. The team selected a limited set of strategic pillars that reflected what made the company unique. The framework became an input, not the output.

Executive Dialogue 6

Time to hash out the most difficult challenges

This was the first physical meeting, and it mattered.

Ambition was debated in earnest by looking at different ambition archetypes. For example, ambitions focused on outperforming competitors versus ambitions focused on ubiquity and reach. Each option implied very different strategic and organizational consequences. A clear ambition direction was chosen, with a working title to be refined further.

Values were approached differently. Rather than starting from wording, the team prioritized the most important dilemmas and worked through how these could be reconciled. By working through these reconciliations, a set of potential emerging values started to take shape.

The team also reviewed the global footprint across brands, categories, and markets, and agreed to start from category priorities before market prioritization.

Executive Dialogue 7

From intent to portfolio economics and disproportionate growth bets

This phase focused on shaping a global strategic growth plan.

A Pareto analysis revealed in further detail where most value was created today. Executives built realistic multi-year growth scenarios for these core product–market combinations and saw, live, how much fuel they could generate to invest elsewhere.

From there, a set of potential disproportionate growth bets was identified and handed to task forces for further assessment.

The second part of this phase focused on consolidation and usability. Strategic pillars were reduced from seven to five. For each pillar, objectives, goals, and strategies were further developed using an OGSM logic.

Remaining dilemmas were worked through, resulting in a complete set of emerging values. Executives then started to define the behaviors they would expect to see as do’s and don’ts. This proved to be a powerful test of whether the newly defined values would actually drive the desired behavior. These inputs later formed the basis for a leadership team charter.

Executive Dialogue 8

Refinement under external scrutiny

The strategic framework was reviewed with shareholders to stress-test ambition, strategic logic, and value creation. Ambition wording was sharpened. How-to-win strategies were refined. The five pillars were clarified further, without reopening fundamentals.

The framework improved without losing its essence.

Executive Dialogue 9

Locking the framework and preparing for activation

The final physical meeting focused on clarity and readiness.

The strategic growth plan was reviewed again with refined top- and bottom-line expectations, including businesses that are not globally decisive on their own but together provide meaningful fuel for future growth bets.

Purpose and ambition were refined and locked. The team explicitly separated the two, ensuring purpose remained clear and meaningful, while ambition captured aspiration.

Values were refined for global clarity and signed off. Objectives, goals, and strategies for each of the five strategic pillars were finalized.

Finally, the team returned to the employee survey conducted earlier in the year. Employee input was used to design the activation approach, shaping not only what would change, but how change would be brought to life.

Closing reflection

The project of defining the strategic framework ended here. The work did not.

What followed was all about activation across the organization and hardwiring the framework into operating processes and procedures.

This journey shows something simple, and demanding.

Strategy does not fail because leaders lack intelligence or ambition. It fails when coherence is assumed, dialogue is rushed, and activation is treated as an afterthought.

Here, coherence was built deliberately. Through sustained executive dialogue, evidence-based choice, reconciliation of real dilemmas, and continuous listening inside and outside the leadership team.

That is how a strategic framework moves from paper to practice.

Invitation

Most organizations don’t suffer from a lack of strategy, but from a lack of coherence and follow-through. If that sounds familiar and you want to explore a different way of doing the work, I’d be happy to continue the conversation.

What Every Modern Company Can Learn from Würth.

For more than fifty years, the Würth Group has delivered double-digit growth selling screws, fasteners, and related installation materials. The secret is deciphered Wachsen wie Würth (Grow like Würth) by Bernd Venohr, I finally got the chance to read and apply it.

Its performance is not luck. It is the result of a highly disciplined management system built over decades, one that treats organizational tensions not as problems but as sources of energy.

Instead of choosing between two extremes or compromising in the middle, Würth deliberately does both. This ability to balance contradictions in a productive way drives clarity, speed, and profitable growth. Below is an overview of 5 key takeways behind this performance and why they matter for any modern company that wants to grow faster and become more adaptive.

Five Key Takeaways from Würth’s Operating Model

1. Mastery of dilemma thinking “Doing Both”

As described in 21st Leaders for the 21st Century by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, highly successful business leaders apply a “both-and” leadership style, reconciling dilemmas rather than choosing sides. Leadership is not authoritarian or participative, nor a weak compromise halfway between the two.

One-sidedness — overemphasizing a single viewpoint — or settling for a compromise is one of the most common mistakes in popular management formulas. It leads to stagnation and ultimately decline.

The most successful entrepreneurs deliberately seek out tension fields, because these tensions create energy in the organization. They turn opposites into complements, dilemmas into innovation.

Reinhold Würth understands this deeply. His entire management system is built around reconciling five key tensions (see further below), allowing the organization to be both disciplined and entrepreneurial at the same time. Yes. This “both-and” mindset is not a theoretical idea. It is the engine behind fifty years of double-digit growth.

2. A System Refined Over Decades

Würth’s excellence is not cultural magic. It is the product of fifty years of disciplined refinement across culture, strategy, structures, processes, and systems, all working together as one operating model.

3. Radical Decentralisation with Identical Units and a Linked Target System

The company is built from many small, independently operating units that all follow the same planning logic and management rhythm. This creates speed, ownership, comparability, and accountability. Each unit operates like a mini-company, with its own business plan directly linked to long-term group ambitions. Each individual sales person, in term, also plans and executes his/her own plan. This cascaded target system turns strategy into daily action and creates clarity on what must be achieved, by whom, and by when.

4. Radical Transparency for Self-Control

Monthly reporting covers finances, customers, employees, process quality, acquisition quality, productivity, sales, and supply chain. This level of transparency enables self-control, not inspection.

5. Growth Beyond Market Rates

Würth is not driven by market growth percentages. It is driven by territory acquisition potential, disciplined expansion of customer relationships, and continuous penetration of local markets.

The Five Dilemmas That Power Würth’s Success

Centralization vs. decentralization

Frontline responsibility enabled through central measures. Entrepreneurial ownership happens in small, independent units: “Strict decentralization with small units is the most important leadership principle. ” Certain foundations are centralized to ensure consistency, such as the Policies and Procedures Handbook and a global ERP backbone.

Entrepreneurial freedom vs. control

Freedom for high performers through strong control for low performers. Early experiences with poorly run territories led to a tight system of daily reporting and performance tracking. High performers enjoy autonomy. Those who struggle see their freedom reduced. This keeps the organization dynamic, accountable, and fast.

Profit vs. growth

Growth and profitability reinforce each other. Without one, the other becomes dangerous. Würth puts it simply: “Profit without growth is deadly,” and “growth without profit is deadly.”

Vision vs. hard number orientation

Reinhold Würth pairs bold ambition with uncompromising numerical discipline. As a visionary “whole-hearted expansionist,” he motivates and inspires: “The successful businessman differs from the average colleague through the ability to build visions, to think the unthinkable.” At the same time, he insists on rigorous financial control:“Numbers are among the most important things for me. If there is anyone in this company who looks at the numbers, it’s me.”

Overview vs. detail

He constantly moves between the strategic “top floor” and the operational front line to stay grounded: “I knew how my leadership decisions landed with the people, how they affected their daily work, how my employees felt during implementation.” This sensitivity is paired with disciplined long-term planning, including a structured ten-year process introduced in the 1970s.

Würth’s Management System Overview

This shows how Würth integrates culture, strategy, structures, processes, and systems into one coherent philosophy. Every unit operates within the same logic. Every leader works within the same rhythm.

There are three coherent layers:

1. The culture with its values and leadership principles is the foundation.

2. The strategy clearly laying out the ways to grow and it's unique organization as source of competetive advantage.

3. The structures, processes and systems anchoring the culture and strategy.
   

It's not about copying the system, but rather, diligently building a system over time that works given your company's context, guided by values and principles.

Source: Wachsen wie Würth, by Bern Venohr

How This Connects to “Built to Adapt”

Würth’s system is one of the clearest examples of what it means to be a company that is truly built to adapt.

• It uses tension as a source of innovation and momentum

• It creates clarity so people can act without waiting

• It decentralizes entrepreneurship while centralizing only what is essential

• It aligns culture, strategy, structure, processes, and systems into one coherent operating model.

• It reinforces ownership through performance, autonomy, and customer proximity

• It moves faster than its market through disciplined expansion of territories and relationships.

This is the essence of Built to Adapt: A company that thrives not by choosing one management philosophy, but by intelligently reconciling opposing forces, creating a system that is both disciplined and entrepreneurial.

Würth shows that adaptability is not chaos. It is structure, clarity, incentives, and trust — all working together to create momentum at every level.

If you want to accelerate growth, increase entrepreneurship, or sharpen execution, Würth offers one of the most instructive models of the past half century.

Instruct AI agents with values to control what is controlling you

Introduction

CEOs of frontier AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthrophic and Heads of AI worldwisde should consider norms and values the AI agents they build will apply to steer behaviour in ways you want.

As autonomous agents will increasingly run parts of your company, much like a growing group of employees without direct leadership involvement, it’s crucial they behave in alignment with the values you believe are best for your company.

While defining norms (what’s good and bad) is essential, embedding clear values (what is perceived as better) is what guides behavior when your agents face conflicting demands. What should your AI do when there’s no single "right" answer, when it has to choose between seemingly conflicting alternatives? For example, a customer service agent might choose a personalized solution for an individual (Individualism) or a group discount (Communitarianism), depending on the customer’s cultural context. These choices matter.

In a recent episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast (#459), the conversation centered on Deep Seek, China, Nvidia, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Mega Clusters. Beyond the technical advances, what stood out was the looming question of how autonomous these AI models are becoming and what values are being embedded into them.

“As AI becomes more powerful, the question isn’t just what it can do, but what it should do—and who decides that."— Lex Fridman

“This is what people, CEO or leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic talk about—autonomous AI models, which is: you give them a task and they work on it in the background.” — Nathan Lambert

These reflections raise a critical issue: 

As AI agents become more autonomous, how do we ensure they make decisions aligned with our human values, especially when those values differ across cultures?

Autonomous Agents as Culture-Bearers

Imagine autonomous agents acting within your company, not as tools waiting for commands, but as self-directed actors, working much like teams of employees without direct oversight. Just like human teams, these agents will encounter dilemmas. What happens when there is no single “correct” answer? Which path should the AI choose?

To guide these decisions, we need more than rules, we need values.

Enter the Seven Dimensions of Culture developed by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. 

This model offers a powerful framework. It's seven dimensions describe how people (and by extension, agents) navigate dilemmas based on their underlying cultural values. Here are the dimensions, plus examples for each. 

1. Universalism vs. Particularism Should the same rules apply to everyone (universalism), or should we adapt based on relationships and context (particularism)? Example: Should an AI procurement agent stick strictly to procurement guidelines, or make an exception for a long-term supplier who’s late due to a natural disaster?

2. Individualism vs. Communitarianism Should decisions prioritize the individual or the group? Example: Should a benefits chatbot recommend individual rewards for performance or group incentives to foster team cohesion?

3. Neutral vs. Affective Should communication remain emotionally neutral, or allow emotional expression? Example: When handling customer complaints, should an agent maintain a calm tone or mirror the customer’s frustration to show empathy?

4. Specific vs. Diffuse Should relationships and tasks remain separate, or be integrated holistically? Example: Should an internal HR agent focus solely on performance metrics or take the employee’s personal situation into account?

5. Achievement vs. Ascription Should status be based on accomplishments, or assigned based on age, title, or education? Example: Should an AI mentor program recommend leadership training to a young high performer or to a senior manager based on tenure?

6. Sequential vs. Synchronic Time Is time linear and task-based, or flexible and parallel? Example: Should a scheduling agent prioritize tasks one after another, or allow overlapping deadlines to match cultural norms?

7. Internal vs. External Control Do we control our environment, or adapt to it? Example: Should an AI sustainability planner set aggressive internal targets regardless of market volatility, or adapt them based on external pressures?

Why this matters

Autonomous agents are already making trade-offs based on implicit values coded into them. If these values are unexamined, or worse, misaligned, they can lead to unpredictable or even damaging outcomes. But if we embed values deliberately, we can shape agents that behave in ways aligned with our intent, culture, and purpose.

In other words: 

"Values are how AI agents resolve dilemmas."

Let’s not wait for AI to “absorb” values by default. Let’s define them clearly, contextually, and globally.

Our call to action

I believe in creating a shared core of values for autonomous agents, with the flexibility to localize where appropriate. If you’re a CEO or Head of AI who cares about making agents more aligned, responsible, and culturally aware, we'd love to hear from you.

We’re currently developing a framework using Trompenaars’ model that organizations can adapt. Reach out, or contact Fons Trompenaars directly if you’d like to help shape how AI agents will behave when you're not in the room.