Strategic coherence: who decides what a company shows

In this Italian-language video, shot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I say that behind every great exhibition there is the curator, who decides the order, the rhythm and the meaning, and that a company’s coherence comes in the same way from whoever decides what to hold together. Here I explain who makes that decision in a company, drawing on a study by Dennis Gioia and Kumar Chittipeddi of how the people who lead an organization shape its meaning.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

Every time I come to New York, the Met is one of the places I go back to. Not so much for the works themselves as for the thinking that put them there. Because a great exhibition comes out of years of quiet work. Curators who select, discard, rearrange. What we see is only the tip of the iceberg. The rest is a decision. And that is the first thing a business strategist does: deciding what to show, and what not to.

What a museum exhibits is always a tiny fraction. An artist like Raphael left hundreds of works. A museum shows a few dozen. That choice does not only define the artist. It defines the way we read him. This is true of works of art. It is also true of companies. A company is not defined only by what it does. Above all, it is defined by what it chooses not to do.

Behind every great exhibition there is a figure almost nobody notices. The curator. They do not paint, they do not sculpt. They decide the order, the rhythm, the meaning. What looks to us like natural beauty is, in fact, a deliberate construction. The same is true inside a company. Coherence is never spontaneous. It is the result of someone deciding what to hold together. That is what a business strategist is. They do not produce the work. They build the meaning that keeps it standing.

Even the most complete exhibition is a choice

The Met’s Raphael exhibition is, according to the museum, the first comprehensive show on him in the United States: more than 170 of his works, including drawings, paintings, tapestries and decorative arts, brought together from collections in many countries. Its curator, Carmen C. Bambach, speaks of seven years spent putting it together. And it is still a choice. The great frescoes of the Stanze, the rooms Raphael painted in the Vatican Palace, cannot be moved. They appear in the exhibition through their preparatory studies, including those for the School of Athens and the Disputa, and through a video.

Part of the choice is imposed by the material itself. The Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints holds about 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints and 12,000 illustrated books. Because paper fades, a sheet can be shown only for short periods, about three months at a time, under controlled light; the rest of the collection can be seen by appointment, in the study room. What a museum shows is a part of what it holds, by choice and by necessity.

In the video I say that this choice also defines the way we read the artist. At the Met the drawings are shown alongside the paintings, and visitors to the exhibition meet a Raphael in the act of thinking, as well as the Raphael of the finished works. This is the subject of the other video I shot there, on his preparatory drawings. A company works the same way, with one difference that matters: decisions about what to show are often made without anyone really making them.

A company’s coherence is not spontaneous: it comes from choosing what to show and what to hold together, and that choice belongs to the people who run it.

Those who lead an organization shape its meaning

In 1991, in the Strategic Management Journal, Dennis Gioia and Kumar Chittipeddi published an ethnographic study, that is, one based on close and prolonged observation. It followed the first year of a strategic change effort at a large public university. They divided that year into four phases, which they called envisioning, signaling, re-visioning and energizing: the vision taking shape, the moment it is communicated, the moment it is revised and the moment people are set in motion.

The role of the person leading the university, they concluded, can best be understood through two concepts. The first is building one’s own sense of what is happening (sensemaking). The second is trying to shape the way others interpret it, toward a new reading of the organization (sensegiving).

In 1991 Dennis Gioia and Kumar Chittipeddi described the task of those who initiate strategic change through two concepts: understanding what is happening and shaping the way others read it.

The curator does this with works of art. In a company the materials are more varied: which products to keep in the catalog and which to let go, which clients and which projects to put forward, what the website, the catalog and the trade fair stand say, which priorities the people who work there see every day. Each element, taken on its own, can be right. What counts is how they fit together. When nobody decides this, everyone shows the company in their own way, as I explain in the piece on company identity.

The curator decides on behalf of the museum; in a company, the people who run it decide

In the video I say that a business strategist’s work begins with the choice of what to show, and what not to. It is the heart of the job. The difference from the curator draws its boundaries. The curator is responsible for the exhibition and decides on behalf of the museum. In a company the choice stays with those who bear the risk of the business: the owners and the board. The strategist’s work is to help them make it: putting the pieces and the criteria in front of them, proposing an order, checking that the parts hold together. This is what I mean when I say that I help an organization, together with its owners and board, decide what to do and what not to do.

The curator decides on behalf of the museum; in a company the owners and the board decide, and the business strategist helps them choose what to show and what not to.

Gioia and Chittipeddi’s study points the same way: for them, giving meaning to an organization is the task of those who lead it, and whoever works alongside them, I would add, prepares that work. This is also where the difference between a business strategist, a manager and a coach lies, and it is first of all a difference in position.

Choosing what to show also means choosing what to leave in storage, and that is the hardest part, because every product and every project has someone who cares about it. I discuss this at length on the page about the business strategist. In the work on identity and positioning, that choice becomes a page written with the owners: what we are, what we are not, and therefore what we show. It is one of the decisions through which a business strategy becomes visible even to people who have never read a line of it.

Coherence that is only on display becomes a stage set

An exhibition has an advantage a company does not: it is installed once and stays as it is for months. A company shows itself every day, with every phone call and every delivery. The meaning proposed by the people who run it is tested constantly, by those who buy from it and by those who work for it. Gioia and Chittipeddi call one of their phases re-visioning, and the name alone says that a vision, once communicated, goes back on the table.

If what the company shows does not match what it does, coherence becomes a stage set, and anyone who walks in notices it from the first contact. A successful strategy, as I explain when discussing strategic alignment, can be recognized precisely because people, processes, products and image all say the same thing.

There is one more condition, and it applies to the curator and the strategist alike. To choose what to show, you need to have seen everything, storage included, and that is why I ask companies for full access to the numbers and to open issues. Those who agree to be seen in full, even where things are not in order, make the most useful choice for themselves, and it is not a choice everyone has the courage to make.

What to do and what not to do

• At least once a year, put everything the company shows on the same table: catalog, website, proposals, presentations.
• Decide at leadership level, with written criteria, what stays on view and what does not.
• Check that what you show is also what you deliver.
• Do not let each department decide on its own how to present the company.
• Do not leave the choice of what to show to whoever builds the website or the stand.

Sources

• Dennis A. Gioia, Kumar Chittipeddi, “Sensemaking and Sensegiving in Strategic Change Initiation,” Strategic Management Journal, 12 (6), 1991, pp. 433–448. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250120604
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release on Raphael: Sublime Poetry. https://www.metmuseum.org/press-releases/raphael-sublime-poetry
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Drawings and Prints. https://www.metmuseum.org/departments/drawings-and-prints