Some difficulties persist even though the executive has already tried the answers usually offered: coaching, leadership seminars, team support or managerial transformation.
Sometimes a restructuring has already been carried out without solving the problem. Sometimes it seems disproportionate to what remains to be settled.
When none of these answers is enough, perhaps the problem lies elsewhere.
Lead or Follow takes that elsewhere seriously.
We examine what happens between the executive’s decision and what the organisation does with it: how it receives it, processes it, transforms it and carries it — or not — through to the intended result.
With particular attention to expert functions, whose interventions, responsibilities and frameworks can play a decisive role in that trajectory.
Today an executive is expected to give a vision, inspire their teams, trust, delegate and refrain from micromanaging. These expectations are legitimate. But they do not replace the exercise of the executive’s office: leading the company towards the result for which they received a mandate.
It is for the executive to determine the destination, to choose a trajectory and to make the decisions needed to follow it. When several possibilities cannot be pursued together, it falls to them to choose.
They can neither know everything nor do everything. That is precisely why they surround themselves with specialised skills, organise their intervention and entrust them with responsibilities.
But delegating the execution of a decision does not mean giving up piloting its effects. And asking what an intervention changes in the chosen trajectory does not mean doing the work in place of the person to whom that intervention was entrusted.
Trusting is not giving up deciding. Delegating is not silently transferring strategy. Piloting is not micromanaging.
The question, then, is not how to give back to the executive an authority they would have lost. It is how an organisation can allow them to exercise effectively the authority that is theirs.
That is the question Lead or Follow is concerned with.
This work is addressed to executives who intend to exercise their mandate fully, whether they are designing their organisation, piloting it, or trying to understand why it produces something other than what they had decided.
It does not presuppose an executive in difficulty.
It starts from an ordinary question: how can we ensure that the skills mobilised in the service of a decision actually make it possible to achieve its object?
My practice as a lawyer led me to examine decisions from what they had become: the commitments they had produced, the interventions that had altered them, the arbitrations that had been made and those that had not.
That retrospective view taught me to distinguish what arose from an obligation, from a technical assessment or from a choice; to look for who held the power to decide; and to understand how several interventions, each justified in its own field, could transform the trajectory originally chosen.
But the value of this experience is not to look at the company through the difficulties it might face.
It is to be able to reason the other way round.
If we know how to reconstruct what a decision has become, we can also ask about the conditions that allow the executive to follow its trajectory while it is being built.
How can specialised interventions be organised without dispersing arbitration? How can constraints be made visible without confusing them with prohibitions? How can the executive be enabled to weigh alternatives without having to redo the work of their experts?
These are the questions that guide my work: extending the legal analysis of decisions to the organisational conditions of their exercise.
Not to build an ideal organisation, identical for everyone, but to examine what allows each one to keep the agility needed to carry out its strategy.
Lead or Follow was not born from a theory of leadership.
The work starts elsewhere: in law, and with a much more elementary question. What happens if you do nothing?
My doctoral research looked at the unsecured creditor facing the risk of non-payment.
The usual question is how that creditor should have protected itself. I was interested in the other side of the problem: if no additional protection was put in place, what remains? What does the law already provide? Are you really left with nothing?
That step back leads to another question: can a company organise every decision around the maximum case — the gravest risk, the strongest exposure, the heaviest sanction — as if it were bound to happen?
Some organisations still have the means to take off despite this prudential gravity. Others remain on the tarmac. By preparing every decision for the worst imaginable case, one can end up making action itself impossible.
In my thesis I had begun to sketch the figure of the strategist unsecured creditor: not the one who suffers the risk for failing to protect himself, but the one who measures the risk of non-payment, the cost of cover and the real effectiveness of security, then chooses, knowingly, what he accepts to bear.
The shift was already there: not confusing prudence with the accumulation of protections.
Lead or Follow extends that question to the scale of the company: who arbitrates what the organisation must really protect, what it can bear, and what it must not let neutralise its trajectory?
The question then becomes less: how do we add yet another protection? And more: who can decide that we know enough to act?
That is how I arrive at the executive. Not the “leader” as an inspirational figure charged with formulating a vision and letting it trickle down through the organisation. The accountable one.
The law has known this figure for a long time. Depending on the relationship it grasps, it names it differently: employer, trader, director, representative, person in charge. The qualifications change; one question remains: to whom can action, arbitration and decision ultimately be attached?
In a company, everyone seems to have an expertise, except, at times, the person who leads it. Legal masters the law. Finance, financial balances. Risk, exposure. Compliance, the rules that apply. And the executive would merely coordinate, inspire and communicate a vision.
That picture does not hold. The executive is not chosen for being the expert in nothing. They are chosen because they have shown a particular capacity to read a situation, choose a trajectory, arbitrate between several possibilities and commit the company to one of them.
Strategy is their expertise.
Decision is its exercise.
Accountability is its counterpart.
The other expertises do not fade before it. They constrain it, equip it, make it more robust. But they do not replace it. Expert functions master their material. The executive masters the trajectory.
Strategy is the set of decisions taken or yet to be taken by the executive to fulfil the mandate entrusted to them — that is, to produce the result by which their action will ultimately be judged.
Vision is therefore not strategy: it sets the horizon, the result sought. Strategy is the succession of decisions that makes it achievable. Hence the sequence:
The point is not to place strategy above the law, risk or expertise. It is to give each its role.
The norm bounds. Expertise makes constraints, margins and passages visible. The executive arbitrates and decides.
From there, another question becomes visible: what becomes of that decision when it crosses an organisation that has progressively internalised every function charged with protecting it from risk? Legal. Compliance. Risk. Privacy. ESG. Security. Procurement. Internal control.
Each acts rationally. Each protects something real. But none has received, by its expertise alone, the mandate to substitute its own trajectory for the company’s. This is the shift Lead or Follow observes, names and seeks to govern. It proposes:
Not a universal method. Not a cultural transformation programme. An operable doctrine — that can be installed, tested, corrected, and that withstands its own objections.
The four Corpus follow this progression: seeing a function become autonomous; understanding how a decision returns stripped of its margins; identifying the vacuum of direction between expertises; and finally laying down the architecture that lets strategy cross the norm without dissolving in it.
What precedes is held firmly enough to be stated. The rest is under investigation: the Institute tests it against reality, organisation after organisation.
What we are observing nowThe work of Lead or Follow concerns the executive decision as a whole. It nonetheless meets a field on which our experience is particularly decisive: that of expert functions.
The two hold together: Lead or Follow is concerned with piloting the executive decision and, within that frame, with organising the contribution of expert functions — making their expertise contribute to the decision without letting their autonomy become a centre of decision that displaces it.
As norms multiply, organisations create, specialise and strengthen the functions charged with mastering them. Each develops its own language, instruments, criteria of assessment and modes of intervention.
The executive must nevertheless keep exercising their mandate through this whole, without being meant to become a lawyer, a compliance officer, a risk manager or a specialist in each of these disciplines.
Our legal experience allows us to approach these functions from their own professional logic. We know what distinguishes an obligation from a recommendation, an expertise from an arbitration, a functional prerogative from a power to decide.
That knowledge makes it possible to work on one particular difficulty: organising the contribution of expert functions to strategy without asking them to give up their expertise, or the executive to give up their office.
It is on this ground that four complementary capabilities are deployed: installing the pilot, finding and training the aiguilleurs, repairing the trajectory, and governing the whole — that is, exercising the five questions of Lead or Follow when expert functions come on stage.
They do not form a sequence. One company may arrive directly through the third; another already has the right people and comes for the fourth. Training an aiguilleur is not the automatic answer: if the aiguilleur already in post is themselves contributing to the drift of the trajectory, it must be possible to examine and repair it, or to govern the whole. These are not four distinct offers: they are capacities mobilised in the work presented at The Quinta (Decide A. · Hold A. · Execute A.).
Build the conditions in which the executive can exercise their mandate in the face of expert functions, without replacing their expertise.
Install the pilot →Identify within the organisation, or recruit, those who already know how — or could learn — to produce expertise oriented towards the decision to be taken and the trajectory to be held; then train them and have them work as aiguilleurs: the École des aiguilleurs (Thinking Like Your Boss, Holding the post, Be N-1, Be the One).
Find and train the aiguilleurs →When the organisation produces a result different from the one decided, without a new arbitration having authorised it. Reconstruct the trajectory, distinguish the decisions actually taken from the unarbitrated transformations, then act on the mandates, circuits, expert production and people concerned.
Repair the trajectory →Exercise the five questions of Lead or Follow when expert functions come on stage: Decide what, exactly? Who decides what? Pilot what, in fact? Arbitrate what, day to day? Answerable for the whole? Govern their collective contribution to the executive decision, without removing their competence and without their autonomy becoming an autonomy of direction.
Govern the whole →A question before choosing? The Quinta — Bring your situation
The reflection originated in doctoral research on creditors, the risk of non-payment and protection mechanisms. This thesis constitutes the documentary origin of the doctrine.
Consult the thesis — HAL Thèses →The people who carry the work: The Quinta — Who carries the work