What Tony Blair’s intervention tells us about leadership, strategy, and why both matter more than ever.
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About 25 years ago, in reference to strategic planning for businesses, I heard the phrase “Structure follows Strategy.”
We can possibly add to that: “Strategy follows Vision.”
That came back to mind this morning when I read the essay by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
The article - “The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country” - is not written for a business audience. But it should be read by one.
Putting politics aside, it very clearly demonstrates the importance of Vision, and then Strategy, before you start thinking about Structure - in this case, the Structure being the key people needed to deliver it. A new Prime Minister. A Chancellor. The Cabinet that follows.
It is a lesson that applies with equal force to every founder, managing director, and senior leadership team running a business today.
Blair’s argument - stripped of its party politics - is straightforward.
Labour’s crisis is not primarily a personality crisis. It is not about whether Keir Starmer is likeable enough, or whether Wes Streeting has the right manner, or whether Andy Burnham could energise the membership.
Those are Structure questions.
The deeper problem is that no one at the top of British politics has a worked-out answer to the Vision question: what kind of country are we trying to build? And without that, the Strategy question - how do we get there from here? - cannot be answered either.
So you end up with a leadership contest. A debate about who holds the wheel. With no agreement about where the vehicle is going.
I see the same thing in business. Not every week, but often enough to recognise the pattern.
A founder steps back and leaves a capable successor in place. The successor is talented. They work hard. But two years in, the business has drifted. Not failed. Just drifted. Because the Structure was there, but the Vision and Strategy were not.
Structure follows Strategy. Strategy follows Vision. Miss the first two steps and the third one cannot save you.
Blair identifies two changes he believes are reshaping the world.
The first is geopolitical. America’s unchallenged dominance is over. The world is moving towards a G2 or G3 order - America, China, eventually India - and by that arithmetic, everyone else, including Britain, is a middle power. The alliances we relied on are being renegotiated. The trade routes we took for granted are not guaranteed.
The second is technology. Specifically, artificial intelligence.
His words on this are worth quoting in full, because they are not the words of a politician trying to sound modern. They are the words of someone who has thought about this seriously:
“There is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or bad thing. Just know it is a ‘thing’. In fact, it is ‘the thing’. It will displace jobs, though creating new ones, but no one yet knows the full consequence. Companies and countries will rise or fall on the back of it. It will revolutionise the private sector and should in time revolutionise public services and government. Yet people in most countries, including Britain, have no idea what is about to hit them.”
Companies and countries will rise or fall on the back of it.
That is the sentence that should concern you most as a business owner.
Not the Labour leadership contest. Not the next Budget. Not even the election after that.
The question is not what the government will do about AI. The question is what you will do about it.
Blair’s geopolitical framing translates directly into business.
If the world divides into leading powers and middle powers - those shaping events and those responding to them - then so does any competitive landscape.
In most sectors, there are businesses that lead. They set the agenda. They attract the best people. They define what the product looks like and what the client expects. And there are businesses that follow. Not failing, not collapsing, but reacting. Never quite ahead of the curve. Perpetually catching up.
The difference, more often than not, is not talent or product quality. It is thinking.
The leading businesses have made a deliberate decision about where they are going - a clear Vision - and built a coherent Strategy to get there. They have looked honestly at where their market is heading, including the technology question, and made choices while they still had time to make them properly.
The businesses that follow are busy. They are competent. But they have not stopped to think.
And in a period of fast change - the kind Blair is describing - the gap between these two groups widens quickly.
Blair uses a precise phrase.
“We don’t have a worked-out, coherent plan.”
The word worked-out matters. It is doing a lot of the work in that sentence.
A Vision is not a plan. A direction is not a plan. A set of values on a wall is not a plan.
A worked-out plan means you have done the hard thinking. You know where you are - honestly, not optimistically. You know where you want to be - specifically, not vaguely. And you have thought seriously about the gap between those two things and what it will actually take to close it.
Most businesses have the first two elements in some form. The third is where it falls apart.
Because the bridge - the realistic, resourced, sequenced set of decisions about what has to change, in what order, and who is responsible - is hard. It requires honesty about constraints. It requires choices, which means giving things up. It requires looking at uncomfortable subjects - succession, equity, leadership capability, the things that have not worked - and naming them plainly.
That is the conversation most businesses have not had. Not because they lack the intelligence or the ambition. But because no one has created the space to have it properly.
And so the urgent beats the important. Another quarter passes. And the Vision that everyone broadly agrees on stays exactly where it has always been - somewhere in the future, waiting.
Let me come back to the technology question, because it is not abstract.
Blair is right that the AI revolution will change everything. He is also right that most people have no idea what is about to hit them.
But here is what I would add, from a business advisory perspective.
The businesses that will be damaged most are not necessarily the ones that fail to adopt AI tools. They are the ones that have not thought clearly about what their business is actually for - and therefore cannot make sensible decisions about where technology helps and where it threatens.
If you have a clear Vision and a worked-out Strategy, then AI becomes a question you can answer. Do these tools help us deliver our service better? Do they change our cost base in ways we can exploit? Do they change what our clients need from us, and therefore what we should be offering?
These are answerable questions. But only if you have done the strategic thinking first.
Without that foundation, every new technology announcement is just another distraction. Another thing to be anxious about. Another wind to totter in.
Blair uses a memorable phrase about the government: “too often they seem to totter in the breeze.” The ballast that is missing is a Vision people believe in and a Strategy built to deliver it. Everything else is noise.
There is one more dimension of Blair’s essay that translates directly into business.
He talks about the government’s tendency to avoid hard choices. To defer. To hope the problem resolves itself, or that something changes before a decision has to be made.
Succession is the equivalent in private business.
Most founders know, at some level, that they will not be running their business for ever. Most also know that the time to think about succession is not when you are under pressure to deal with it, but years before.
But the conversation keeps getting postponed. Because it feels remote. Because it is emotionally complex. Because actually naming your exit - even to yourself - feels like acknowledging something you are not quite ready to acknowledge.
And then, suddenly, it is not remote any more.
The business owner who plans their succession ten years out has options. They can shape the leadership structure gradually. They can identify and develop the right internal successors. They can structure the equity in a way that aligns everybody’s interests. They can model what their retirement actually needs to look like and make sure the business is capable of funding it.
The business owner who starts this process under pressure has far fewer options and usually a considerably worse outcome.
This is not a pleasant truth. But it is a consistent one.
I said earlier that the Blair piece stopped me.
Here is why.
The argument he is making about Britain is exactly the argument I have been making to business owners for thirty years.
The problem is not the people. In most of the businesses I work with, the people are talented, committed, and genuinely excellent at what they do. The founders built something real from nothing. The senior team is capable. The product or service is good.
But they are operating without a worked-out, coherent plan in a fast-changing world.
And in a period of fast change - geopolitical, technological, structural - the cost of that is rising.
You do not need to be worried about Labour’s leadership to be affected by what Blair is describing. The AI revolution does not care who is in Downing Street. The competitive pressure in your sector does not pause while a political party sorts itself out.
What Blair is identifying - a leadership vacuum, an absence of strategic thinking, a tendency to react rather than plan - those are not just political problems. They are organisational problems. They affect countries.
They also affect businesses.
The difference is that you, as a business owner, can actually do something about it.
Blair’s prescription for Britain is what he calls the Radical Centre.
Not left. Not right. Not “moderate” in the sense of being vague or uncommitted. But genuinely centred on the question: what is the right answer? - and then having the nerve to pursue it.
In business terms, that means starting in the right place.
Vision first. Where are we going? What does this business look like in ten years if everything goes right? What do you personally want to have built - and are those two things aligned?
Strategy second. What needs to change to get there? Not everything. The right things, in the right order, with the right resources behind them.
Structure third. Who leads what? How is equity structured? Who makes decisions, and how? What does the organisation need to look like to execute the strategy?
Most businesses try to answer the Structure questions without having done the Vision and Strategy work. Most political parties do the same. The result, in both cases, is the same: motion without progress. Activity without direction.
Real strategic thinking does not emerge from a strategy away-day where people go through the motions. It does not emerge from a template or a framework. It emerges from a genuine conversation - with the right questions, the right honesty, and someone in the room who has seen enough businesses at enough turning points to know which problems matter most.
It usually takes about three hours.
Some brown paper helps. A decent Sharpie is optional. But recommended. [See our recent article on business planning].
Blair ends his essay with a question:
“We have done it before and can do it again. But will we?”
He is asking it of the Labour Party and of Britain. Whether the answer is yes is genuinely uncertain.
You face the same question about your business.
The fast-changing world he describes is not coming. It is here. The AI revolution is not a future event to prepare for. It is a present reality to navigate. The leadership and succession questions are not problems to solve later. They are conversations to have now, while you still have time to have them properly.
The country may or may not end up with a worked-out, coherent plan.
Whether your business does is entirely up to you.
If you would like to start that conversation - the honest, the specific, the properly worked-out kind - I would be very happy to have it.
