On strategic leadership
I’m on the Eurostar to Paris, reviewing the a case about Real Madrid’s Alignment as part of the pre-work for discussion for the Strategic Leadership module of the Columbia CMO program I’m pursuing.
Long story short, it’s about how In 2014, Real Madrid had a choice to sign Luis Suarez, the most dangerous striker in the world, a player who had just dragged Liverpool into a title race almost by force of will; or James Rodriguez, fresh off the World Cup Golden Boot, clean-cut, marketable and more aligned with their values.
Most organizations would have taken Suárez in a heartbeat. He was a guaranteed goal machine. The kind of signing that would make headlines, sells shirts, buys you breathing room.
But Real Madrid didn’t.
Florentino Perez, the club president answerable not to a private owner or hedge fund but to 90,000 socios who could vote him out, chose Rodriguez. And Barcelona immediately snapped Suárez up, and very quickly built the MSN trio (Messi–Suarez–Neymar), and bulldozed everyone. Treble. 122 goals. Glory.
For a season, Madrid looked like fools.
But zoom out.
Barcelona got their peak, then the bill came due in astronomical wages, financial freefall, Messi leaving for free, and years of painful rebuild. Madrid stayed disciplined, kept their wage structure intact, rebuilt methodically, and went on to win three straight Champions Leagues.
They lost the battle. They won the war.
It reminded me of Shackleton’s Atlantic expedition. The point wasn’t planting the flag, but keeping the crew alive long enough to see land again. Perez knew that signing Suarez might have won him the next season but risked tearing the club’s system apart if it went wrong. He chose to protect the system over the scoreboard.
That’s not sexy. It doesn’t play well on Sky Sports. But it’s why Madrid were still standing when Barcelona’s MSN era burned out.
I guess this is what a strategic leader is actually supposed to do:
Protect the system before you chase the result.
Hire for alignment, not just talent.
Make calls that may look wrong now but will still make sense five years from now.
Because that’s the job. Long term survival, to fight another day. It’s leeping the thing intact so it still works when the headlines move on. Not feeding the quarterly beast or performing decisiveness for Wall St analysts, as we so often see in the headlines these days.
But the uncomfortable truth is that most corporate leaders today don’t get to make this choice.
Boards expect the Suarez move; the big, shiny-shiny decision that signals ‘action.’ Investors punish patience. CEO tenure is too short for anyone to see the payoff from a Rodriguez-style bet. So they mortgage the future, juice the metrics, and leave the next guy to clean up.
It’s the fault in the system. Quarterly capitalism rewards winning the next battle, not surviving the war.
So here’s the question II keep circling back to –
Would your board let you pass on the Suaez if it meant losing the next quarter, even if it set you up to win the next decade?
And if the answer is no, then who exactly is steering the ship… the captain, or the current?
