Today's constantly changing business environment requires strategic leaders who can envision a future for their organization and then shape the flow of internal events consistent with external changes. This article sums up the required components of strategic leadership to translate vision into reality.

The business environment in the 21st Century has become highly volatile and hypercompetitive. To be successful and to survive in this environment, organizations require strategic leaders. Strategic leadership is concerned with providing the direction and inspiration to effectively ensure a competitive fit between the organization and its environment. The emergence of large organizations needs strategic leaders at every level of the hierarchy to embark on new initiatives and devise innovative solutions to problems to succeed. The task of a strategic leader is primarily related to coping with changes and bringing the range of necessary modifications in the organization consistent with changes in an environment. The components of strategic leadership can be classified into gathering multiple inputs, anticipating and creating a future, and revolutionary thinking.

Strategic leaders, while setting a tone for the future of an organization, gather data from a wide range of interested parties similar to the process of conducting a research. According to Strategy theorist Gary Hamel, the process of strategy creation is to be democratic by involving hundreds, if not thousands of new voices if we desire to increase the odds of seeing the future. For example, Carlos Ghosn, COO of Nissan realized the importance of listening to employees at all levels and learning from them. According to Ghosn, involvement of employees in the process of decision making will facilitate the company to grow. He emphasized that the implementation of decisions would be easier by involving employees in the decision-making process. His style of leadership can be described as democratic and participatory. Commenting on his style of leadership, Ghosn said, "I am not a micro manager. When I trust people, I let them do their job." Another example supporting the viewpoint of using multiple inputs to derive a successful strategy took place in Cadillac, a few years before the auto's 100th anniversary. For so many years, the Cadillac was known as the older set's left-lane land yacht.

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