The strategic orchestration we apply at Vaiaut rests on solid ground: it comes from strategy research by Donald Sull (London Business School) and Alejandro Ruelas-Gossi (Adolfo Ibáñez School of Management), published more than a decade ago, and it's the framework behind how we work.
The idea starts from a question that makes any leadership team uncomfortable: what do you do when you spot a real opportunity but don't have — and don't want to permanently build — all the resources, capabilities, or people needed to capture it? The traditional answer has been to invest in building that capacity in-house, buy it through an acquisition, or simply let the opportunity pass because "it's not what we do." Sull and Ruelas-Gossi documented a fourth path, present in companies as different as Apple, Nespresso, Ryanair, and CEMEX: assembling and coordinating a network of partners around the opportunity, instead of trying to control every piece yourself.
They call this an "allocentric" orientation, as opposed to the "egocentric" orientation that dominates most strategy theory. Egocentric strategy starts from the individual firm: what do I control, how do I leverage it. Allocentric strategy starts from the opportunity and the network needed to capture it, regardless of how much of that network sits outside the organization's four walls. CEMEX didn't build thousands of its own hardware stores to sell cement to low-income families in Mexico: it orchestrated a network of distributors, banks, and community leaders — its Construrama program — and stayed on as the node that coordinates, not the owner of every piece. Apple didn't manufacture every iPod accessory, app, or case: it orchestrated an ecosystem of partners around a product that was simple for the user but hard for competitors to replicate.
This way of operating has a concrete advantage the original study documents: while the traditional approach requires spending time and capital building internal capacity before moving, orchestration lets you move faster, adapt when conditions change, and commit less of your own capital. The trade-off is that it demands a different kind of leadership: one that leads through diplomacy rather than hierarchical authority, because network partners take part voluntarily — they can't be compelled.
This is, in essence, what we do at Vaiaut, with one particular twist: instead of orchestrating only a network of outside parties, we act as the temporary node that coordinates people, capital, technology, and decisions inside the client's own organization for a defined period — the 30-day diagnostic and the 100-day execution plan — and then we step back, leaving that coordination capacity installed in the team that stays. We orchestrate execution while respecting the client's structure for as long as the initiative lasts, and we hand off the model before we leave.
Understanding this matters because it changes the question a CEO should ask when facing a strategic priority that's hard to execute. It's not "do we have the internal team for this?" but "who needs to move, in what order, and who can coordinate that movement without becoming a permanent structure?" That's the question strategic orchestration — Sull and Ruelas-Gossi's, and the one we apply at Vaiaut — is designed to answer.
Based on: Sull, D. and Ruelas-Gossi, A., "Strategic Orchestration" (Business Strategy Review, 2010) and "Strategy Orchestration: The Key to Agility on the Global Stage" (Harvard Business Review América Latina, 2006).