The best leaders hold the long view and the present moment at the same time. Some organizations are caught in one.

You’ve heard the saying: don’t lose the forest for the trees. Keep your eye on the big picture. Don’t get so caught up in the operational details that you lose sight of where you’re going. It’s good advice. Every leadership program in the world teaches some version of it, and in moments of organizational crisis, rapid market shift, structural disruption, competitive pressure from every direction, it is essential advice.

But I want to offer a counterweight, because there is another way to lose your way, one that gets far less attention in leadership literature.

You can lose the trees for the forest.

You can become so oriented toward vision, strategy, and the long arc that you stop seeing what is right in front of you. The trees are not a distraction from the forest, the trees are what the forest is made of.

Vision without execution is hallucination 

Most senior leadership teams are good at forest thinking. It is, in many ways, what they were selected and promoted for. The ability to synthesize complexity into direction, to hold long time horizons, to make decisions under uncertainty without being paralyzed by it.

But forest thinking, unanchored from the particular, becomes........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)