Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM, on the need to move away from a purely hierarchical approach to strategy:

“…for technologies and markets, the hierarchical approach is too rigid and must be complemented with more dynamic, bottoms-up approaches that constantly probe and react to what is going on within the business and out in the marketplace. Achieving the proper balance between a top-down strategy — necessary for proper governance, and a bottoms-up strategy that reflects the realities of the marketplace may be one of the biggest competitive challenges facing a business.“