Strategic alignment: the strategy that needs no explaining

In this Italian-language video, shot in Brooklyn, I say that a well-made strategy does not need to be explained, because you can sense it, and that the person who builds it is a kind of invisible architect. Here I bring in a Chinese text more than two thousand years old that describes the same idea as it applies to those who govern, and I explain how to recognize, from outside, a company in which strategy has become the way it works.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

When a company finds its internal balance, a coherent language and a solid cultural vision, then it can truly grow.

At that point strategy is no longer theory: it becomes everyday practice.

My work is to guide companies along this path, step by step, until they are independent and self-aware.

Because a well-made strategy does not need to be explained: you can sense it.

A business strategist is not an outside consultant, but an invisible architect.

They work so that the company functions, communicates and inspires.

They combine analysis and sensitivity, logic and intuition, rigor and imagination.

And when everything aligns (the people, the processes, the products and the image), then the strategy has done its work. It stays invisible, but it is present everywhere.

It works, and it turns goals into results.

A successful strategy is recognized before it is explained

Some companies are easy to understand from the first contact. The quote arrives when it was promised, the person on the phone knows what the company does and what it does not do, the product keeps the promises the website makes, and the person who delivers it talks like the person who sold it. No one needs to explain that company’s strategy, because you can see it at work.

A successful strategy needs no explaining: you recognize it by the consistency between people, processes, products and image.

This is strategic alignment seen from outside, by people who do not read the internal documents and do not attend the meetings. Customers, suppliers, investors and prospective employees form an idea of it before they even know what it is called. And the reverse is also true: a company that has to explain its strategy at length to the people it meets is usually asking, in words, for trust that its actions have not yet earned.

The leader people barely know exists

The Tao Te Ching, the book that tradition attributes to Laozi, is a composite text: the oldest manuscripts date from around 300 BC, and by the middle of the third century BC it had taken a relatively stable form (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Chapter 17 describes four kinds of leader, from the highest to the lowest; some translations, such as Luciano Parinetto’s Italian one, read them as a sequence in time. At the highest level is the leader people barely know exists. Then comes the leader people love and praise, then the one they fear, and finally the one they despise.

The Tao Te Ching describes the best leader as the one people barely know exists: when the work is done, everyone says it happened by itself.

The closing lines of the chapter are the subtlest part. When the work is done, the text says, people think it happened by itself; in Parinetto’s translation, they say they are this way of their own accord. In Chinese the word is ziran, literally “self-so,” one of the most important concepts in the book. The best leader works in a way that leaves people the credit for what they have done. The text adds a detail that also applies to the people who run a company: that leader is sparing with words, and values the few they use.

The analogy has a limit. The Tao Te Ching speaks of those who govern, while the strategist helps those who govern: leadership stays with the owners and the managers. But the analogy holds for the mechanism, that is, for the working method of someone who enables others to act on their own.

How to recognize an aligned company from outside

In the video I say that the strategist is an invisible architect rather than an outside consultant. By that I mean someone who, instead of delivering a plan and leaving, works inside the company until the people, the processes, the products and the image come into line. After that, the strategist stays on as a sounding board. That is why engagements have a set length, usually six months or a year, and a stated aim: to make the company independent.

From outside, alignment shows in small things: different departments give similar answers to the same question, and what the company promises in its communications matches what the product does. New employees learn quickly how decisions are made, because the rules are few and clear. Even exceptions remain exceptions, instead of becoming a second strategy that runs alongside the first.

It is the outward sign of what I describe, seen from the inside, in the piece on how to tell when an engagement is working: the company stops asking the strategist what to do and starts reporting back on what it has done. Inside, the question changes; outside, what changes is the impression the company makes on those who meet it.

Before becoming invisible, the strategist is visible

Invisibility carries a risk, though, if it is mistaken for a method. A consultant who always works behind the scenes does not ask the awkward questions, does not ask the owners to be there, does not call habits into question. That consultant remains well liked, and the company stays as it was.

Invisibility is an outcome, not a method: during the work the strategist is visible, raises awkward questions and asks the owners for their time.

For months the strategist’s presence is hard to miss: in the regular meetings, in the questions asked at every level, in the request that the owners stay present and question their own ideas. Only when the work on the company’s organization and culture has borne fruit can that presence become lighter. At that point the business strategy works on its own, and those who meet the company recognize it without being able to name it.

What to do and what not to do

• Ask a customer or a supplier what they have understood about the company, and compare it with what the company wants to be.
• Check that different departments answer the same question in the same way.
• Agree at the start of an engagement on how the company will learn to manage on its own.
• Do not mistake for alignment a strategy that has to be explained every time.
• Do not ask the strategist to stay behind the scenes while the work is still to be done.

Sources

• Tao Te Ching, chapter 17, edited by Luciano Parinetto, La Vita Felice, 1995. Other Italian editions: Daodejing. Il canone della via e della virtù, edited by Attilio Andreini, Einaudi, 2018; Tao te ching. Il libro della Via e della Virtù, edited by J.J.L. Duyvendak, translated by Anna Devoto, Adelphi, 1973.
• Alan Chan, “Laozi,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2025 revision. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laozi/