Reinventing Strategy … embracing “Dynamic Strategy” for a world that never stops … how the world’s best companies stay focused, fluid, and future-ready

October 1, 2025

In a world where change is constant and disruption arrives from every direction, the old approaches to strategy are no longer fit for purpose.

Annual planning cycles, five-year roadmaps, and exhaustive spreadsheets may have served their purpose in the industrial age, but today they are relics. Markets shift in weeks, technologies evolve daily, competitors appear out of nowhere, and customer expectations recalibrate by the minute. The pace of change has outstripped the rhythm of traditional planning. Companies that cling to these old habits are not merely slow—they are vulnerable.

Dynamic Strategy is a new proprietary methodology developed through several years of collaboration with leading companies across industries.

Dynamic Strategy is a leadership capability, built on a curious mindset, and business discipline. It transforms strategy from a static artefact into a living system that senses, adapts, and learns in real time. It combines focus and flexibility, foresight with action, curiosity with rigour, and bold imagination with disciplined agile execution. It does not promise to predict the future; it equips organisations to shape it.

The organisations that have embraced Dynamic Strategy, like Amazon and DBS Bank, Schneider Electric and Microsoft, do not simply survive disruption, they thrive on it. They anticipate it, navigate it, and in many cases, create it. They understand that advantage is transient. Every breakthrough is copied, commoditised, or disrupted faster than ever.

The traditional goal of building a defensible position has been replaced by the imperative to evolve faster than change itself. Dynamic Strategy provides the compass for this journey—a living system for navigating uncertainty with clarity of purpose and direction, together with agility and speed.

The concept of Dynamic Strategy

Dynamic Strategy is a proprietary methodology designed for today’s fast-moving world. It is not a single tool or document, but a comprehensive approach that integrates purpose, foresight, experimentation, data, and culture into a continuous feedback system. It enables business leaders to:

• Sense change early and anticipate the best opportunities for innovation and growth.

• Leap forwards with hypotheses, tested  rapidly through experimentation.

• Align resources and teams around purpose and values, but with freedom to deliver.

• Balance exploitation of today’s business with exploration of tomorrow’s possibilities.

• Integrate human imagination with AI-enabled intelligence to accelerate learning and progress.

Dynamic Strategy transforms strategy into a living capability, turning uncertainty from a threat into a source of competitive advantage.

10 principles of Dynamic Strategy

Dynamic Strategy rests on ten interconnected principles, each forming part of the DNA that enables organizations to thrive in complexity and uncertainty.

1. North Star: Inspired by purpose

In traditional strategy, purpose is often an afterthought, a line of rhetoric in a vision statement that rarely guides daily decision-making. In Dynamic Strategy, purpose is the anchor. It defines what matters most and provides coherence when everything else is in flux. Purpose is not about slogans, or short-term performance, it is about why the organisation exists, what it stands for, and how it delivers value to the world.

• Microsoft: Satya Nadella’s articulation of Microsoft’s purpose “to empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more” became the anchor for the company’s transformation from software provider to cloud-first, AI-powered ecosystem. Purpose enabled coherence across business units, guiding investment, culture, and innovation.

• DBS Bank: Piyush Gupta reinvented the bank of the future with an unexpected purpose, to “Live More, Bank Less” which transformed a conservative Asian bank into an agile, customer-centric powerhouse. Teams aligned behind this inspiring ambition, unlocking their creativity to innovate and grow, rather than do what every other bank does.

Dynamic purpose enables organisations to prioritise quickly, align teams globally, and make bold choices even in ambiguity. When purpose is clear, decision-making does not stall during uncertainty; instead, it accelerates, anchored in a shared ‘why’.

2. System Thinking: From plans to patterns

Where traditional strategy follows a linear process—analyse, decide, implement—Dynamic Strategy treats the organisation as a living system. It sees the company as a network of interdependent teams, processes, and experiments, all sensing and responding to the world in real time. Strategy is no longer a static plan but a pattern of evolving choices.

• Haier, for example, operates thousands of micro-enterprises under its Rendanheyi model. Each unit is empowered to sense customer needs, innovate independently, and iterate continuously. The corporation behaves less like a hierarchical machine and more like a living market, adaptive and aligned, capable of learning at scale.

• Amazon’s “Always Day One” culture pervades the organisation, encouraging speed and creativity. Small “pizza” teams are empowered to make decisions, run experiments, and learn, forming an adaptive network that responds in real time to market shifts.

Decisions are continuous, emergent, and aligned with the shared purpose. This principle enables organisations to pivot rapidly, test multiple approaches simultaneously, and harness the collective intelligence of the system rather than relying on centralised, episodic decisions.

3. Perpetual Foresight: Seeing the future first

Traditional strategy assumes the future can be predicted and planned for. Dynamic Strategy assumes the future is uncertain and constantly evolving. Organisations must develop continuous foresight, not once a year but every day. This involves scanning for weak signals, modelling multiple scenarios, and actively exploring emerging opportunities and threats.

• Shell: Scenario planning was originally developed by the Anglo-Dutch energy business, and has guided them through oil crises, renewables, and energy transitions for decades, turning foresight into strategic advantage. Scenario rooms in The Hague head office are constantly updated, and become the scenes for immersive strategic thinking.

• Nvidia: Foresight informs product strategy and market entry, allowing them to anticipate shifts in energy, computing, and AI landscapes. This long term approach, typically focused on the markets of customers rather than just their own, enables them to great a more compelling future narrative, which inspires investors, and their share-prise.

• Schneider Electric: Uses foresight to align sustainability initiatives with new technology adoption, creating early mover advantage in green energy markets. This has empowered its reinvention from equipment producer to energy management company, and to be continually ranked as the world’s most sustainable business.

Dynamic organizations don’t just react—they anticipate. The goal is not prediction—it is preparedness for multiple plausible futures, enabling rapid, informed action. Foresight also shapes resource allocation, investment decisions, and experimentation priorities.

4. Strategic Choices: Being smart, staying relevant

Strategy is, at its core, about choice. Traditional approaches often treat choices as final and unchanging. Dynamic Strategy treats them as hypotheses to be tested and refined. Choices are made, resources are allocated, and learning loops determine whether they remain valid or require adjustment. Dynamic Strategy treats choices as hypotheses, continuously tested and refined.

• Netflix provides a clear example. Its initial pivot from DVD rentals to streaming was only the first step. Subsequent moves into content production, gaming, and advertising illustrate a pattern of continual strategic recalibration, informed by data and experimentation.
• Fujifilm: As markets changed and disruptive new challenges emerged the Japanese business pivoted from film to healthcare to cosmetics, aligning strategic choices with emerging opportunities and core competencies. Skincare for example was a consequence of a capability in making thin films, previously for photographic imaging.

Dynamic strategic choices enable organisations to continually reassess “where to play and how to win” and thereby stay relevant, balance risk and reward, and evolve portfolio allocations with the market rather than reacting after disruption has occurred.

5. Experimentation Engine: Learning at the speed of change

Where traditional strategies often rely on analysis and committee approval, Dynamic Strategy embeds experimentation into the organisation’s DNA. An experimentation engine allows organisations to discover the future rather than predict it, accelerate innovation cycles, and reduce the cost of failure through controlled, evidence-based testing. Every initiative is treated as a hypothesis; every pilot generates evidence. Learning replaces assumption.

• Amazon exemplifies this principle. Bezos’s insistence on doubling experiments each year fuels innovation from Prime to AWS. Failures are expected and leveraged as insights. AI now amplifies this process, enabling rapid simulation, iteration, and predictive testing at scale.

• Airbnb: Micro-experiments in pricing, search, and user experience drive constant adaptation and improved customer engagement. This was a behaviour championed by its founders who themselves pivoted many times in their early days, and was accelerated during Covid pandemic, when they had to quickly adapt to survive in a non-travelling world.

Dynamic organisations test rapidly, learn continuously, and scale successes. Experimentation, often supported and accelerated by AI, replaces assumption with evidence-driven strategy, enabling organisations to move faster and with higher confidence.

6. Data Pulse: Real-time intelligence for real-time strategy

raditional strategy often relies on lagging indicators—last quarter’s results, annual surveys, or delayed analytics. Dynamic Strategy thrives on real-time intelligence, continuously feeding operational, customer, and market data into decision-making loops.

• Shopify: Uses live indicators for sales, engagement, retention, and supply chain performance, allowing decisions in real time across its entire ecosystem.

• Uber: Dynamic pricing, routing, and service deployment are continuously updated based on a data pulse. AI  integrates internal metrics with external signals, producing foresight in motion.

• Coca Cola: Starting with what’s happening in the real world, they actively monitor in real-time the posts and behaviours of consumers and merchants across the planet, able to instantly adapt demand, messages, promotions, pricing and more.

Strategy becomes a living conversation with the market, responsive to immediate changes and emergent trends. A strong data pulse allows organisations to sense trends as they emerge, make faster course corrections, and align resources dynamically rather than waiting for annual review cycles.

7. Aligned Agility: Focused freedom across the system

Dynamic Strategy balances freedom with focus. It requires organisations to balance autonomy with alignment. Traditional hierarchies can stifle speed, while completely decentralised approaches can fragment effort. It  empowers teams to act with freedom while maintaining coherence with the organisation’s purpose and priorities.

• Spotify’s model of “alignment with autonomy” allows squads to innovate independently but within a shared framework. These squads and tribes operate independently, innovating within the context of overarching objectives. Ideas are developed with more ownership, relevance, and impact.

• DBS Bank: Employees co-create strategy through hackathons, jams, and digital workflows, aligning creativity with corporate purpose. They use creative catalysts – “What would Jeff Bezos do?” – “How can we be 10 times not 10% better?” – “Imagine if we were to the customer” – to continually rethink how to innovate and grow.

Aligned agility enables organisations to experiment, innovate, and adapt locally while maintaining global coherence, combining the best of decentralised initiative and centralised vision.

8. Dual Portfolios: Delivering today, creating tomorrow

Perhaps the most important tool is to manage the short and long-term initiatives of the business – to exploit the present and explore the future – not as a trade off, but to allocate resources effectively, and manage continuous progress. Developing two portfolios, typically one for 1-3 years, and the second beyond, means they can work dynamically:

• Fujifilm exemplifies dual horizons. While exploiting its chemical and imaging expertise, it explored healthcare, regenerative medicine, and digital solutions, reinventing itself without abandoning its DNA. It actively manages both the exploit and explore portfolios to allocate resources, investments, and inspire investors.

• PingAn has become much more than an insurance company – continuing to exploit that core business – but also explore new ventures – from healthcare to mobility and real estate – and its case by creating dual CEOs, one managing today, one managing tomorrow.

Dual horizon design allows organisations to deliver reliable results today while continuously investing in the future, reducing the risk of obsolescence and enabling sustained growth.

9. Reinvention Design: Continuous reimagination and renewal

Change can no longer be episodic. Dynamic organisations build reinvention into their rhythm. Innovation cycles, strategy sprints, and continuous improvement loops become permanent features, not one-off initiatives. They see themselves in “perpetual beta”, always evolving.

• IKEA, through “democratic design” and circular supply chain experiments, continuously rethinks products, formats, and customer engagement. Renewal is no longer reactive, instead it is embedded, disciplined, and deliberate. Strategy and innovation become one.

• Amazon: Constant re-evaluation of business units and experimentation enables continuous market adaptation. At a macro level, it becomes apparent how the business is evolving – from bookstore to everything store, business platform to market platform.

Reinvention by design ensures organisations never stagnate, continuously evolving to capture the new opportunities. This continuous cycle of reinvention, progress and growth means they shape markets, rather than just following them

10. Courageous Culture: Thriving in a world of uncertainty

Finally, strategy lives in people. Dynamic Strategy depends on a culture that values learning and transparency. Leaders admit uncertainty, invite exploration, and create psychological safety. It thrives on imagination, curiosity, and courage. Leaders model vulnerability, invite exploration, and replace fear with learning.

• Schneider Electric’s approach of trust and empowerment at scale enables local teams to innovate while remaining aligned with global purpose. A courageous culture allows organisations to navigate uncertainty, embrace experimentation, and harness collective creativity as a competitive advantage.

• Haier: Teams self-organize around customer needs, creating a culture of experimentation and ownership. Leaders at head office act more like VCs providing investment and guidance. This “rendanheyi” model unlocks more ownership, more creativity, more relevance, and collaboration, and more speed.

Dynamic organisations nurture people who think for themselves, challenge assumptions, and act decisively. AI may enhance intelligence, but it is human imagination that creates meaning and progress.

Dynamic Strategy in action

Dynamic Strategy is not theory. It is being practised, refined, and scaled by some of the world’s most dynamic companies, each using it to turn turbulence into transformation, to continually reimagine the future, and reinvent themselves.

Microsoft: Reinventing a tech giant

When Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, Microsoft was still vast and profitable, yet widely seen as a relic of the past — a company defined by its legacy, not its future. Its products dominated the corporate world, but its spirit had stalled. Internal silos stifled collaboration, innovation was cautious, and culture had hardened around efficiency rather than exploration. The company that had once shaped the digital revolution now seemed to be standing still as new forces — Apple, Google, Amazon, and emerging start-ups — captured the imagination of the world.

Nadella’s arrival marked the beginning of one of the most remarkable corporate transformations of the century. His mission was not to fix Microsoft, but to reawaken it. He began by dismantling the silos that had divided product teams and mindsets for decades, replacing internal competition with shared purpose and open collaboration. The company’s mission was reframed from “a computer on every desk” to “empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more.” This simple yet profound redefinition unlocked a new horizon — not about devices or software, but about human potential and digital possibility.

At the heart of this transformation lay the principles of Dynamic Strategy. Nadella recognised that Microsoft’s greatest challenge was not technological but cultural. Strategy, he believed, could no longer be a five-year roadmap delivered from the top; it had to be a living process that learned and evolved in real time. He replaced the company’s rigid planning cycles with shorter, iterative horizons. Teams were encouraged to experiment, collaborate across boundaries, and connect purpose to performance. Microsoft began to act like a networked ecosystem rather than a corporate fortress.

Purpose anchored the journey. Nadella championed empathy as a leadership value and curiosity as a strategic muscle. He frequently reminded teams that “our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation.” The idea was not to chase competitors but to rediscover the company’s soul: a belief in empowering others through technology. This shift in mindset — from knowing to learning, from defending to exploring — became Microsoft’s new source of energy.

The growth mindset, inspired by psychologist Carol Dweck’s work and deeply embedded across the organisation, became both a cultural philosophy and a strategic tool. It replaced the old fixed mindset that prized optimisation and control with a living framework for continuous learning. Teams were encouraged to test ideas quickly, share feedback openly, and see mistakes as data rather than failure. The company that once feared change now designed for it.

This cultural reinvention laid the foundation for Microsoft’s technological and commercial transformation. Under Nadella, the company accelerated the evolution of Azure, its cloud platform, from a supporting service into the strategic backbone of global enterprise digitalisation. Azure’s open architecture, partnerships, and integration with AI positioned Microsoft as an indispensable partner in the world’s digital transformation — a shift from selling software to enabling ecosystems.

The pivot to AI and open collaboration exemplified Dynamic Strategy in action. Rather than seeing artificial intelligence as a side project, Nadella embedded it at the heart of the business. AI became a capability that every product and service could draw from — from Office 365 to GitHub Copilot to Dynamics. Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn and partnership with OpenAI reflected this systemic approach: connecting platforms, data, and intelligence into a unified strategic network. The company’s bold move to integrate generative AI directly into its productivity suite — rebranding it as “Copilot for Everything” — not only reshaped the software landscape but redefined how humans and machines work together.

Nadella’s leadership was distinguished by its calm intensity. He led not with bravado but with belief — creating psychological safety that allowed experimentation to flourish. His ability to balance humility with ambition set a new tone across the organisation: strategy as learning, leadership as enablement. He famously described his role as “the curator of culture,” understanding that long-term advantage comes not from a single breakthrough but from building an environment where breakthroughs are continuous.

Foresight guided the journey. Microsoft stopped predicting the future and started building optionality — positioning itself at the intersections of emerging technologies rather than committing too early to any single path. The company’s investments in cloud infrastructure, developer ecosystems, AI research, and quantum computing illustrate this principle: each initiative designed to sense, adapt, and evolve in response to what emerges.

Experimentation accelerated everything. Thousands of micro-initiatives — from local innovation sprints to open-source collaborations — allowed Microsoft to learn faster than it grew. Its transformation into a platform company turned customers into co-creators, developers into partners, and competitors into collaborators. The result was a dynamic feedback loop: every product release, user interaction, and partner engagement fed insights back into the company’s learning system, reinforcing its adaptive capacity.

The outcome of this cultural and strategic renewal has been extraordinary. Microsoft’s market capitalisation has risen from around $300 billion to over $3 trillion, making it one of the world’s most valuable and admired companies. But the deeper success lies beneath the numbers — in the way Microsoft has redefined what enduring performance looks like in the digital era. It is no longer a company driven by plans and hierarchies, but by principles and possibilities. It no longer sees strategy as prediction, but as participation — a continuous dialogue between people, purpose, and technology.

Nadella’s Microsoft shows that reinvention is not an event but a habit — the disciplined practice of curiosity, empathy, and imagination applied at scale. Its story demonstrates that Dynamic Strategy is not about speed alone, but about rhythm — the rhythm of sensing, learning, adapting, and renewing. Microsoft became a company that learns faster than it grows, and in doing so, it grew further than anyone imagined.

DBS Bank: Making banking invisible

In Singapore, DBS has transformed itself from a bureaucratic state-owned institution into one of the world’s most admired and dynamic financial innovators. Once known as the “Development Bank of Singapore,” the organisation was structured for stability, not speed — focused on compliance, not creativity. But under the leadership of CEO Piyush Gupta, DBS embarked on a remarkable reinvention that redefined what a bank could be in the digital age.

At the heart of this transformation lies a bold guiding idea: “Live More, Bank Less.” Far more than a marketing slogan, it became the North Star for every strategic decision, innovation, and cultural shift within the company. Gupta’s vision was to make banking so intuitive, seamless, and integrated into people’s lives that it would disappear into the background — allowing customers to focus on living, rather than managing their finances. In his words, “people don’t want to do banking; they want to buy a home, travel, build a business, and secure their future.” The role of DBS, therefore, was to remove friction from these experiences — to humanise finance through technology and empathy.

To realise that ambition, DBS had to transform not just its technology but its operating system — the way it thought, worked, and learned. Gupta and his leadership team introduced a new rhythm of Dynamic Strategy, built around adaptability, experimentation, and co-creation. The bank shifted from long-term planning cycles to continuous iteration: short “strategy sprints” where cross-functional teams would test, learn, and scale new ideas rapidly. These teams were empowered to act like start-ups within the bank, each focused on solving specific customer problems — from digital onboarding to wealth management and SME lending.

DBS also built a data-driven nervous system, enabling real-time insight into customer behaviour, operational performance, and emerging risks. This intelligence infrastructure allowed the bank to sense change early and respond faster than competitors — whether through personalised digital experiences, instant credit decisions, or predictive fraud detection. By combining analytics with human-centred design, DBS created products that feel effortless: mobile apps that anticipate needs, chatbots that resolve issues instantly, and APIs that connect banking to the wider ecosystem of travel, commerce, and lifestyle.

Crucially, the transformation was cultural as much as technological. Gupta often described DBS’s journey as moving from “the biggest bank in Singapore” to “the best start-up in Asia.” He dismantled hierarchy, encouraged openness, and made curiosity a strategic asset. The bank adopted agile working principles long before they became fashionable in finance, embedding experimentation into everyday behaviour. Failure was reframed as learning; success was measured not only by profit but by progress — how fast teams could sense, respond, and improve.

This culture of dynamic learning fuelled an extraordinary performance turnaround. DBS became the first bank to be named World’s Best Bank by three major institutions — Euromoney, Global Finance, and The Banker — all within the same year. Its profitability reached record levels, even as it reduced cost-to-income ratios and dramatically increased digital adoption across its customer base. During the COVID-19 crisis, DBS was able to deploy emergency financial solutions and new digital services in weeks, not months — a testament to its adaptive capabilities.

One striking example of Dynamic Strategy in action was DBS’s move into ecosystem partnerships. Instead of building every service in-house, the bank opened its platforms to collaborate with fintechs, start-ups, and consumer brands. Through open APIs and co-creation labs, DBS connected banking to daily life — enabling customers to book travel, make purchases, invest, or even donate directly within their digital environments. This shift from closed systems to open ecosystems allowed the bank to innovate faster and scale more broadly, extending its reach without losing its human focus.

The results are both quantitative and qualitative. Customer satisfaction scores have soared. Employee engagement has deepened. Innovation has become a collective sport rather than a specialist function. Gupta calls this “the joy of banking”— not for the bank, but for its customers and people. Every process, product, and platform is designed around a simple premise: if it feels effortless, we’ve done our job.

DBS today embodies what Dynamic Strategy enables: a living organisation that continuously learns, experiments, and evolves in rhythm with its environment. It no longer waits for direction from the top or for certainty from the market. It acts, learns, and leads differently — turning data into empathy, purpose into performance, and adaptability into enduring advantage.

DBS’s story shows that transformation is not reserved for technology companies or start-ups. It is possible — and powerful — in the most traditional sectors when leadership reimagines the role of strategy itself. By making banking invisible, DBS made progress visible — proving that when an organisation aligns its purpose with its people, platforms, and principles, it doesn’t just adapt to the future; it helps create it.

Fujifilm: The science of endless possibilities

Fujifilm’s journey from near-death to rebirth stands as one of the most profound and enduring corporate reinventions in modern history. When the digital revolution disrupted the photographic industry in the early 2000s, most observers assumed the company’s fate would mirror that of its great rival, Kodak. Film was vanishing, and with it the entire foundation of Fujifilm’s century-old business model. But instead of retreating, Fujifilm reimagined itself — not as a photography company struggling to survive, but as a science company with endless possibilities for renewal.

This shift required more than diversification; it demanded a radical reframing of identity. The leadership team asked a simple but transformative question: What are we truly good at? The answer lay not in cameras or film rolls, but in chemistry, materials science, and the molecular technologies that underpinned the company’s photographic expertise. Fujifilm’s scientists had spent decades perfecting the manipulation of light-sensitive compounds, polymers, and collagen-based coatings — capabilities that turned out to be equally valuable in healthcare, life sciences, and high-performance materials. By seeing itself as a platform of capabilities rather than a product manufacturer, Fujifilm unlocked a new horizon of growth.

The company’s Dynamic Strategy was not about predicting where the world was heading, but about building the adaptive capacity to shape it. Fujifilm established a dual-horizon model: one horizon focused on maintaining the profitability of its imaging and optical technologies — a source of cash flow, heritage, and brand equity; the other dedicated to pioneering entirely new frontiers in healthcare, biotechnology, and advanced materials. This duality was not a compromise but a design principle: using today’s strengths to invest in tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

Out of this approach emerged a series of bold strategic moves. Fujifilm applied its expertise in collagen — once used in photographic film — to develop anti-ageing cosmetics and regenerative medical treatments. Its chemical know-how led to the creation of membranes for water purification and pharmaceutical production. The company invested in medical imaging, diagnostic systems, and contract drug manufacturing, culminating in Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies — now a global leader in biopharmaceutical production. In doing so, Fujifilm turned what was once seen as industrial decline into a platform for health, life, and sustainability.

Crucially, the company maintained its connection to its heritage without being trapped by it. Its imaging business evolved into high-end digital photography, professional printing, and optical equipment for cinema and medicine. Rather than abandoning its roots, Fujifilm reinterpreted them through a modern lens — preserving identity while expanding purpose.

Under the leadership of Shigetaka Komori, this transformation became both philosophical and structural. Komori instilled a culture of kaizen (continuous improvement) fused with entrepreneurial experimentation. He encouraged teams to act like start-ups inside the company, challenging old assumptions and testing new ideas rapidly. Instead of waiting for certainty, Fujifilm learned to move with curiosity, confidence, and conviction — the essence of Dynamic Strategy in practice.

The results have been remarkable. While Kodak filed for bankruptcy, Fujifilm not only survived but thrived. Its revenue base is now more diversified and resilient than ever, with healthcare and high-functional materials accounting for the majority of its profits. Its imaging division continues to grow, not as nostalgia, but as a creative platform connecting art, science, and innovation. The company’s stock price and global presence have multiplied, but more importantly, it has redefined what reinvention means: a continuous process of learning, recombining, and regenerating.

Fujifilm’s story reveals that the most powerful strategy is not to predict the future, but to build one — through imagination, science, and disciplined adaptability. Its transformation is proof that legacy need not be a burden; it can be a source of renewal. In the age of disruption, Fujifilm embodies what Dynamic Strategy makes possible: an organisation that learns faster, adapts deeper, and creates new worlds from the remnants of the old.

Schneider Electric: Leading the green energy transition

Schneider Electric’s Dynamic Strategy brings together sustainability, digitalisation, and decentralisation into a single, coherent narrative — one that evolves continuously rather than being fixed in annual plans or top-down directives. For Schneider, strategy is not a document but a living system — powered by data, driven by purpose, and refined through constant learning at every level of the organisation.

At its core, Schneider’s purpose — to empower all to make the most of our energy and resources — serves not as a slogan but as the organising principle of how it operates. This purpose translates directly into operational logic: every product, platform, and partnership is measured by its contribution to efficiency, resilience, and sustainability. Instead of asking, “How do we grow?” Schneider asks, “How do we enable our customers to do more with less?” That shift — from self-interest to shared progress — turns strategy into an evolving commitment rather than a static ambition.

The company’s approach is deeply data-driven. Through real-time intelligence systems, connected sensors, and advanced analytics, Schneider gathers insights from factories, buildings, grids, and data centres across the world. These feedback loops allow teams to see, measure, and improve energy performance instantly — transforming information into action. Strategic decisions are now modular and iterative, built on living dashboards rather than fixed forecasts. This enables the company to adjust direction quickly, optimise resources dynamically, and co-create new solutions with customers in real time.

What makes Schneider’s model especially powerful is its decentralised execution. Rather than relying on central control, Schneider operates through a network of empowered local teams — each with the autonomy to adapt strategies to regional markets, regulatory shifts, and customer needs. These teams act as nodes in a larger system, connected by shared data platforms and a clear sense of purpose. In India, for example, Schneider has pioneered microgrid innovations for rural electrification; in Europe, it leads industrial decarbonisation projects; in North America, it partners with tech firms to build energy-efficient data centres. Each initiative is local in action, yet global in alignment.

This dynamic interplay between purpose, data, and decentralised decision-making has fuelled both growth and transformation. Over the past decade, Schneider has more than doubled in size, expanded its digital services portfolio, and emerged as a benchmark for environmental leadership. Its EcoStruxure platform — a digital architecture that connects everything from sensors to cloud analytics — has become the backbone of its adaptive strategy, enabling both operational agility and customer innovation.

Schneider’s story demonstrates that adaptability and responsibility are not opposites but allies. Its evolution shows how a business can be both profitable and planetary, both dynamic and disciplined. By embedding sustainability at the heart of its strategy system — not as a department or initiative but as a living principle — Schneider has redefined what performance means in the modern age: not only to deliver results, but to renew relevance, resilience, and impact every day.

Haier: Ecosystems of smarter living

Haier’s rendanheyi model represents Dynamic Strategy taken to its ultimate form,  a living, breathing ecosystem of entrepreneurial energy. What began as a Chinese refrigerator manufacturer has evolved into one of the world’s most radical organisational experiments: thousands of micro-enterprises, each guided by shared purpose and enabled by digital platforms, operating with complete autonomy.

At the heart of Rendanheyi lies a profound shift in the relationship between people and the organisation. Ren refers to the employee, Dan to user value, and Heyi to their seamless integration. Every individual or small team acts as a mini-entrepreneur, directly accountable to customers, measured not by hierarchical goals but by the real impact they create in the market. This creates a system where initiative, not instruction, drives progress — where innovation arises naturally from those closest to the opportunity.

Haier doesn’t rely on a single corporate strategy. Instead, it hosts thousands of micro-strategies — each a dynamic response to specific user needs, emerging trends, or local contexts. The company’s central platforms provide the shared infrastructure — data, finance, technology, and talent marketplaces — that allow these micro-enterprises to experiment, connect, and scale. When one succeeds, it attracts more talent and resources; when one fails, it dissolves quickly and its learning is shared.

The result is an organisation that evolves organically, like a living ecosystem. Haier can incubate a new business in days, partner with external innovators seamlessly, and pivot entire networks of teams around new opportunities. Its refrigerator division, for instance, operates as an open innovation hub co-developing smart appliances with users. Its COSMOPlat platform, meanwhile, has become a standalone industrial IoT ecosystem used by thousands of other manufacturers — transforming Haier from a producer of goods into an orchestrator of value networks.

Haier demonstrates that strategy is no longer about control; it’s about creating the conditions for emergence. The role of leadership is not to plan every move, but to design the ecosystem — to set the purpose, build the platforms, and trust in the adaptive intelligence of people.

What makes Haier’s model so powerful is not only its agility but its humanity. It empowers individuals to act like owners, connects their passions with customer value, and transforms hierarchy into harmony. In doing so, Haier has shown that the future of strategy may not be a grand plan at all — but an evolving choreography of purpose, freedom, and collaboration at scale.

Leading as Performer Transformers

These examples show how Dynamic Strategy changes what strategy is. It is not a plan written by a few for the many to follow—it is a living system enacted by everyone. It’s not about predicting the future but becoming future-ready. It turns uncertainty into advantage, speed into learning, and disruption into possibility.

Organisations that embrace Dynamic Strategy think differently. They act faster. They grow smarter. And most importantly, they build resilience not through defence, but through dynamic coherence—the ability to stay true to purpose while continuously evolving form.

To lead in this world requires a new kind of leader, a “Performer Transformer”. These leaders exploit and explore, they  balance delivery with discovery, discipline with imagination. They lead not by command, but by curiosity. They see the world as unfinished, strategy as evolving, and leadership as the art of enabling others to act with purpose and freedom.

They understand that the future will not be managed into existence—it must be imagined, tested, and built. Dynamic Strategy gives them the tools to do exactly that.

Strategy has always been about choice. But in the age of acceleration, the ultimate choice is this: Do we cling to the stability of plans, or do we embrace the vitality of change?

Dynamic Strategy invites you to choose the future, to choose change – to think dynamically, act boldly, and lead with imagination in a world that never stops moving.

© Peter Fisk 2025

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