How to

build an
organizational
strategy
Bridging the gap between
mission, goals, and work
Table of contents
Introduction.............................................................................................. 03

What is organizational strategy?............................................................ 05

Build strategy, create goals, and stay in alignment ............................ 09

Connecting strategy with goals.............................................................. 12

Organizations succeed when teams collaborate................................. 14

Strategy in the time of remote work ...................................................... 17

Clarity of purpose, plan, and responsibility.......................................... 20

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 2

Introduction
Not long after starting a new role as VP of marketing, Sydney
realized something was wrong.
She’d just joined a high-growth fintech company, which we’ll call
Kash. Sydney was attracted by the startup’s company mission—to
help people make smarter financial decisions—and she arrived
ready to drive real change in society. But almost immediately, her
work felt vague and unclear.
On her first day, the CEO emailed over goals for the marketing
organization—revenue growth, customer count increases,
customer lifetime value improvements, and so on—and instructed
her to get started. But as Sydney began designing her marketing
programs for the quarter, she realized there was a large gap in
Kash’s planning.
She knew Kash’s mission and she understood her goals… but
there was nothing in between. The missing link was organizational
strategy. That’s the dynamic, long-term plan mapping an
organization’s route towards its mission.
Without any coordination, teams can quickly become
misaligned. At Kash, Sydney’s peers had built out their strategies
independently. The VP of sales was doing one thing and the VP
of product something else entirely. Instead of supporting each
other, their strategies were actually hindering other initiatives and
projects. It was messy, confusing, and demoralizing for everyone
involved.
Now, Sydney isn’t a real executive. Kash isn’t a real company,
either. But here’s the thing: this scenario isn’t entirely imaginary.
It’s an experience lived out by thousands of real executives every
single day.
Too often, companies have good missions and important goals
but fail to develop the connective tissue in between. It means
employees struggle to select impactful initiatives and can’t see
the meaning of their work, hindering both their progress and their
engagement. Ultimately, they fall short of their full potential.
That’s especially true right now. The COVID-19 pandemic
disrupted the status quo. It forced millions of office-based
workers and thousands of companies into new remote roles and
required them to adjust their strategies. Cleaved from the comfort
of the office, executives must work harder than ever to forge
connections between strategy and goals.
HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 3
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Strong organizational strategy
creates an ironclad link between your mission, goals, and day-to-
day work. When clarity cascades throughout your organization,
employees feel empowered, engaged, and prepared to do their
best work. This link, combined with improved clarity, allows teams
to remain agile. They can pivot and adapt without losing sight of
their overarching purpose.

In this book, we’ll explore organizational strategy and alignment

in-depth. We’ll discuss what separates a winning strategy from a
confusing labyrinth of opaque objectives and disparate priorities.
We’ll investigate how to implement it in your organization and
connect it with goals. We’ll explore how to cultivate a bond
between strategy and day-to-day work. And we’ll think about it
from a remote perspective, to help you keep everyone aligned
when you have team members in San Francisco, São Paulo, and
Singapore.

Let’s get started.

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 4

01
What is organizational
strategy?

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 5

Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to
sustainable energy. Sony’s is to fill the world with emotion
through the power of creativity and technology. Coca-Cola’s is to
refresh the world and make a difference.
Each is an exceptional mission: simple, compelling, relevant,
and ambitious. They’re a bright North Star behind which an
organization can rally. But missions have their limitations.
destination, your strategy spells out how to get there.”
To see how everything fits together, consider a space agency.
These organizations have incredibly ambitious missions. They
plan to blast off from Earth and explore the whole universe. Faced
with such a grand purpose, it’s fascinating to imagine how an
executive could draw a path from their mission all the way down
to day-to-day work.

A clear and powerful mission provides direction, but can such a

simple statement guide everyday work? Consider a Tesla engineer
logging on one Monday morning. She flips open her laptop, types
a quick hello to her colleagues on Slack… and then what? How
does she “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”
from her kitchen table?

Likewise, how does a music producer at Sony fill the world

with emotion? How does a food scientist at Coca-Cola make a
difference in the world?

As we already mentioned, company missions act as North

Stars. They set the destination for an organization—but they
don’t explain how to get there. That relies on something else:
organizational strategy. But what is it?

“The textbook definition is: the actions a company takes to

achieve long-term results,” explains Lotte Vester, Head of
Organizational Strategy at Asana. “If your mission specifies your

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 6

For this example, we’re using a framework called the pyramid
Pyramid of Clarity
of clarity. It’s a visual way of connecting everyday work back
to strategic objectives so that everyone in your organization
understands how their work ladders up to the company’s mission.
M I SSI ON

The space agency starts with an ambitious mission: Advance our

understanding of space and technology to enable people to live
on other planets. One step down, and you arrive at strategy—
the how behind the mission. In this case, the agency plans to
land astronauts on Mars and return them safely to Earth. Below STRATEGY
that, you get to objectives. That’s everything you need to drive
and execute the strategy—designing the spacecraft, recruiting
astronauts, and staying within budget. And at the bottom,
forming the base of the pyramid is the work—the individual tasks,
projects, and processes that make stuff happen.
OBJECTI V E S

K E Y RE SULTS

P ROJECTS & TASKS

Just like that, you go from the 50,000-foot view of the mission,
to the 10,000-foot strategic perspective, to the “on-the-ground”
day-to-day work. It’s clear, concise, and effective.

Most other successful companies follow suit.

For example, Tesla’s mission is to move the world to sustainable

energy, but they aim to get there through their famous Master
Plan.

“Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery

storage,” wrote CEO Elon Musk in Tesla’s second iteration of the
Master Plan. “Expand the electric vehicle product line to address
all major segments. Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X
safer than manual via massive fleet learning. Enable your car to
make money for you when you aren’t using it.”

Tesla’s mission is still to accelerate our transition to sustainable

energy. Their strategy—their Master Plan—is how they’ll achieve it.

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 8

02
Build strategy,
create goals, and
stay in alignment

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 9

When faced with an awe-inspiring mission, it’s tough to see how • Make personal finance effortless.
it filters down into day-to-day work. That’s why at Asana, we use
• Establish Kash as the most popular personal finance app.
the pyramid of clarity. It helps everyone align around the high-
level purpose of their roles and the concrete results we expect. • Turn Kash into a destination company for employees.
You’ve already seen it working when we broke down the space
agency example.
You can break those strategic bullets down further. Perhaps,
establishing Kash as the leading app means developing separate
Using the pyramid of clarity helps you understand how each
budgeting and spending analysis functionality.
element slots together. Once you understand the theory, you can
begin thinking about translating your mission into strategy and,
To help us dive into the specifics, we turn again to our head of
eventually, turning your strategy into ambitious company-wide
organizational strategy, Lotte Vester, who says she advises leaders
goals.
to call for help. Instead of fumbling through the strategy on their
own, they should harness their team and co-create strategy as a
Jumping between mission and strategy is tough. One is an
group.
ambitious destination. The other spells out your practical plan for
getting there.
“At Asana, we have a lot of co-creation,” she explains. “There’s
engagement with numerous teams that provide feedback and
Consider our fintech startup, Kash, from the introduction. To help
drive strategy. Our CEO, Dustin Moskovitz, doesn’t dictate
people make smarter financial decisions, Kash needs to achieve
strategy. He’s providing direction but relies on the team to plot
three things: It needs a product that customers can use to
the course.”
improve their financial well-being, it needs to acquire those users,
and it needs to build a quality team to make it happen. So Kash’s
One level down from organizational strategy, you reach
mission—to help people make smarter financial decisions—could
company-wide objectives or goals. Those are the medium-term
translate into a three-part organizational strategy.
objectives that drive your strategy. They cover the real initiatives
your organization plans to build and focus on for the year.

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 10

“Objectives are more specific than strategy,” says Vester. “For
example, a business may want to be the number one solution
for clients in a particular industry, such as finance or education.
They’d have a metric for that goal, such as having $10M of
revenue from that vertical. Or perhaps they want the best user
experience. That’s measured by a reduction in churn by a specific
percentage.”

Again, she stresses the importance of co-creation, explaining

that there’s a sweet spot between full bottom-up goal creation
and top-down objective dictation—a hybrid model in which
leaders and workers collaborate to get the best of both worlds.
Leaders set the top-level goals. They’re the visionaries driving the
company and team forward. But when it comes to the details, it’s
the people with their boots on the ground who know best.

That thread of co-creation keeps running even after an

organization has confirmed its objectives. Regular objective
reviews—commonly run every quarter or six months—provide an
opportunity for the leadership team to step back and evaluate
where they are.

“You have a very open discussion around the progress,” explains

Vester. “Are you on track? Do you need to change anything? Are
there any big challenges? Keeping this review to a small group of
goal owners encourages open discussions and means people can
bring anything they want to the table.”

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 11

03
Connecting
strategy with
goals

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 12

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the world
into chaos, things were changing. The rise of cloud-based
software facilitated the growth of remote work and enhanced
collaboration. Suddenly, people could collaborate with co-
workers in different teams or countries as easily as they could
their deskmates.
With multiplying professional connections, our work grew more
complex and agile. An organization’s ability to clearly define
strategic initiatives has never been more important. But just
defining organizational strategy isn’t quite enough.
For his book Profit from the Core, Bain & Company consultant
Chris Zook tracked more than 1,800 large corporations for a
decade. He discovered that most fell well short of profitable
growth. Indeed, seven out of every eight corporations failed to
deliver 5.5% annual growth in revenue.
Perhaps most surprising was that almost every company Zook
studied did invest in its strategy. Most executives defined a
mission and crafted tangible organizational strategies to get them
there. Yet 88% of tracked corporations failed to hit Zook’s modest
performance target.
“Why is there such a persistent gap between ambition and
performance?” wrote Robert Kaplan, Harvard Business
School professor, and David Norton, founder of the Palladium
Group. “The gap arises, we believe, from a disconnect in
most companies between strategy formulation and strategy
execution.”
Indeed, our own research suggests that just 16% of workers
think their company is effective at setting and communicating
goals. Just one in four understand how their work ladders up into
broader strategy.
Think back to the Tesla engineer at the start of this book. Say
she is designing a new electric motor. She needs to understand
how her work connects to goals and her goals to strategy. How
does creating a new electric motor expand Tesla’s electric vehicle
product line? And how does expanding the product line drive the
transition to sustainable energy?
The key to creating an impactful strategy is repairing the
disconnect Kaplan and Norton identified. Your organizational
strategy must be the bridge that connects to your mission
above it and your goals and work below it. That comes from the
pyramid of clarity. By building your short-term goals into long-
term aspirations, you ensure that each project drives progress in
the right way. If you create a goal or project that doesn’t ladder
up into a larger initiative, the pyramid of clarity highlights that
straight away. Then you can fix it. When you operate in a structure
that necessitates cohesion and clarity, the benefits are enormous.
HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 13
04
Organizations
succeed
when teams
collaborate

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 14

By now, organizational strategy might seem straightforward.
Consider Kash again. Sydney’s boss could work with other
C-Suite executives to translate the startup’s mission into a
strategy. Then Sydney could turn that strategy into goals and
work. But in practice, businesses are complicated with a lot of
interwoven teams, departments, and business units.
Indeed, our world is far more complex and intricate than it’s
ever been, according to Rita Gunther McGrath, professor of
management at the Columbia Business School.
“Today’s decision makers face environments in which things that
were isolated from one another just 30 years ago are bumping
up against each other, often with unexpected results,” she
wrote in Harvard Business Review. “That’s because of a host
of technological and sociological changes that occurred after
1980.”
She points to the digitization of massive amounts of information,
smart systems that communicate interdependently, the
decreasing cost and increasing power of computers, the rise
in wealthy human population, and the wholesale rewriting of
industry norms as key drivers for this development.
sales, marketing, and customer success. Then there are
product-focused business units: production, logistics, and
R&D. Underpinning everything are a handful of administrative
functions, such as finance and legal. That’s to say nothing of
structural idiosyncrasies, such as vestigial departments and
replicated functions, or the untold disruption caused by the
COVID-19 pandemic.
Wholesale organizational strategy relies on the cooperation of
those business units. Each team must march in time to the same
drumbeat. If they fall out of lockstep, strategy becomes muddied,
confusing, and disruptive. Suddenly, your R&D team is going
rogue, developing products for a new, undiscussed vertical.
Your marketing team is positioning your business in a way that
alienates your existing customers. And your logistics department
is preferring one group of customers over another.
Unfortunately, this chaotic environment is a frustrating reality
for many. Most leadership teams spent less than one hour per
month discussing strategy. That lack of leadership and direction
erodes all understanding and undermines any inter-departmental
coordination.

As our world has grown complex, so too have our businesses.

Modern companies are an intricate tapestry of independent
business units. You have your core revenue-generating teams:

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 15

But when you align strategies and goals across your organization,
everything changes. As Robert Kaplan and David Norton wrote:
“Alignment creates focus and coordination across even the most
complex organizations, making it easier to identify and realize
synergies.”
Functional alignment starts at the top. Businesses thrive when
everyone is focused on the same broader organizational goals.
Centering the entire company around your most important
objectives allows your employees to stay focused, engaged, and
productive.
Connecting the dots between these teams is essential. Work
management platforms help this process a lot. By sharing goals
across teams—and having them in a living system—you illustrate
how each team goal is part of the same company-wide strategy.
That dissolves the chaotic atmosphere and gets people moving in
the same direction.
And where necessity mandates preferring one team over
another—say, giving extra resources to sales instead of
marketing—Vester recommends organizations explain why.
understands and it creates more buy-in. Ultimately, that drives
motivation and engagement.”
But reinforcing a common goal is just the start. According to
Kaplan and Norton, strategic alignment is an on-going process.
Effective leaders work together regularly to evaluate their
organizational strategies and make tweaks where necessary.
Specifically, Kaplan and Norton discovered that top leaders
typically meet “once a month for four to eight hours” to review
performance, adjust strategies, and tweak execution.
“This meeting provides the opportunity to review performance
and to make adjustments to the strategy and its execution,” wrote
the pair. “The underlying hypotheses of the company’s strategy
can be tested and new actions initiated.”
Instead of working independently towards a shared goal,
collaborative leaders help each other design, refine, and track
each others’ strategies. They work together to ensure everything
they do supports, rather than hinders, their peers’ work.

“It’s very important to explain the ‘why’ behind your decisions,”

she says. “That’s something that our CEO Dustin does
particularly well. He reveals his thought process and explains
why he prioritized one thing over another. That way, everyone

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 16

05
Strategy in the
time of remote
work

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 17

As the pandemic spread around the world, it pushed more
and more organizations into unfamiliar work from home
arrangements. People quickly learned that remote work means
more than just the ability to work in your pajamas.
“Successfully working from home is a skill, just like programming,
designing or writing,” wrote Alex Turnbull, CEO of customer
experience platform Groove. “It takes time and commitment to
develop that skill, and the traditional office culture doesn’t give us
any reason to do that.”
Newly remote workers had to learn how to operate in isolation,
away from co-workers and managers. When people are working
from home, there is no learning by osmosis. They won’t overhear
conversations at lunch or grab a quick drive-by conversation
en route to the water cooler. When you’re remote, every
conversation is intentional, and without that organic flow of
in-person information, it’s incredibly easy for silos to develop.
Remote employees run the risk of completing their work in
isolation, not thinking about why they’re doing it. This is a recipe
for disengagement. Separating day-to-day projects from their
overarching goals and strategy turns them into Sisyphean toil.
Remote workers roll the boulder up the hill for no reason other
than to watch it tumble back down.
Those individual challenges ladder up into serious organizational
woes. Faced with fully distributed teams, leaders quickly
discovered that our old, tried-and-tested communication
strategies didn’t work in a post-pandemic world.
Even before the pandemic, collaboration and communication
consistently ranked among the most complicated challenges for
remote teams. The challenge of communication is particularly
worrying when you consider how quickly the world is moving
and companies are adapting. According to our most recent Goals
Report, nearly half of all organizations have altered their goals
since moving to remote work, and around 47% of workers say
their employers deprioritized their broader organizational goals.
Without a connected communication strategy, those changes
will get missed, and your organization will slip into strategic
disarray.
The good news is that building strategic clarity and alignment in
your organization isn’t complicated, although it’s not necessarily
easy. The theory is just the same as in-person: you define your
mission, craft your strategy, and design your objectives. Each
flows into the other in a cascading wave of clarity.
The only critical difference between remote and in-person lies in
coordination.
HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 18
We solve this problem with our old friend, the pyramid of clarity.
The framework encourages you to connect work to strategic
objectives. If you concoct a strategy that doesn’t support
your mission, it won’t fit into the pyramid. By building a visual
representation of how purpose cascades from one level to the
next, employees will immediately grasp how their work connects
to broader objectives and strategies without missing a beat.

The pyramid of clarity connects goals to specific tasks,

deliverables, and milestones. Bringing big-picture objectives into
your team’s current work can help your team align and focus on
your company’s most important priorities. When you establish a
link between the mission, goals, and work, you empower people
to be more innovative, creative, and agile.

All of that information must live somewhere accessible and

transparent—a work management platform. These platforms,
like Asana, provide a coordination layer across your content and
communication, allowing people to plan, manage, and track their
work from one centralized system. They tear down silos, revealing
how each piece of workflows into the next.

With work management, clarity is the default. When you click

into a task, you don’t just see the small to-do—you can see where
it sits within a larger project and all the context that goes with it.
When employees are isolated from their peers, clarity is a non-
negotiable lifeline.

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 19

06 Strategic misalignment feels like an insidious performance woe—
but it’s not. We’re well aware it’s a challenge. Indeed, more than
95% of employees and executives believe a lack of alignment

Clarity of
negatively impacts the outcome of a task or project.

But if we’re aware of the challenge, why haven’t we fixed it?

purpose, plan, Well, it’s not that we’ve intentionally ignored the challenge
of alignment. As we’ve discussed, most organizations have

and responsibility
implemented some sort of strategy. The difference between a
successful strategy and a middling one lies in how executives
designed and implemented it.

If an executive designs their strategy as a standalone idea,

detached from the mission above it and the objectives and work
below it, workers will inevitably become disengaged, alienated,
and unproductive.

But when you create an iron-clad link between mission, strategy,

goals, and work and you communicate that link to your workers,
great things can happen. Because when entire teams and
companies have clarity of purpose, plan, and responsibility,
they’re able to do their best work.

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY 20

Build strategy, create goals,
and stay aligned.

Learn more

HOW TO BUILD AN ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY