Contents

1. 1.    Execution is Everything
   

2. 2.    Change or Die
   

3. 3.    The Human Side of Strategy
   

4. 4.    Winning Minds (Job One)
   

5. 5.    Winning Hearts (Job Two)
   

6. 6.    Aligning Local Effort (Job Three)
   

7. 7.    Designing Your Organization (Job Four)
   

8. 8.    Strategy Maps
   

9. 9.    Right People, Right Place, Doing the Right Things
   

10. 10.  Aligning the Senior Team
    

11. 11.  HR’s Role in Strategy Execution
    

12. 12.  Leading Strategy Execution
    

Excerpt from Chapter One: “Execution is Everything”

This is a book for anyone who has a dream and wishes to fulfill it, but whose aspirations require the support of others. If you find traditional command-control management appealing or if you find the idea of involving lower-level employees in creating parts of the strategy inadvisable, this probably isn’t the book for you. On the other hand, if you’re a manager who believes there is huge untapped potential in most organizations and you’d like help in unleashing it, or you’re a new CEO who wants to cultivate widespread responsibility among employees and increasing the fun, energy, and passion at work, you’ve come to the right place.

In a nutshell, here’s the thesis of this book: most approaches to strategy implementation fail because strategy is created at one level (the top) and handed off to another (the middle and bottom). Consequently, everyone is frustrated: the tops because the strategy they invested so much energy in creating does not come to fruition; the middle-level managers because they feel like the strategy is just being dumped in their laps; and everyone else because they neither understand the strategy nor feel enthusiastic about it. We believe that to improve strategy implementation, you have to involve employees in creating and carrying out the strategy, and senior managers have to become involved in executing as well as formulating the strategy. This book will tell you how to do both.

Why Should You Listen to (More) Consultants?

We’re consultants, so we know this is true: because there are so many different kinds of consultants and because they are generally so persuasive, listening to consultants is like listening to the proverbial blind men describe the elephant:

•Strategy-creation consultants think only the right market positioning or breakthrough business concept will win out.

•Technical process improvement consultants see deliverance in their process mapping and Six Sigma approaches.

•Enterprise Resource Planning consultants tout IT and standardized business processes as the pathway to success.

•Coaching gurus argue for more leadership throughout the organization.

•HR consultants intone about competencies and capabilities.

In most situations, each of these perspectives typically has something to offer. But all of them make two mistakes: they each think their perspective is the only one that matters, and they believe that outside experts, their tools, methods, and perspectives, not the people in the organization, hold the keys to success. As the saying goes, “If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And ultimately, what gets pounded is the client organization.

This book is built on a perspective that says:

•When change is complex (and sometimes even when it isn’t!), many kinds of expertise will be necessary. At times, you may need each of the consultants listed above.

•But having said this, it is also important that each “expert” be open to the others and acknowledge where the primary expertise in a given system really lies: in the people who live in that system day in and day out. This is a way of saying that most of the information, expertise, knowledge, and wisdom necessary to transform an organization is already present within it.

•When people are brought into the process of creating something larger than themselves, their energy, commitment, and creativity goes up and up and their willingness to take responsibility is truly amazing.

•The Holy Grail of strategy execution for most senior leaders is getting everyone in the organization to understand, feel enthusiastic about, and take action in alignment with the company’s strategy. When people comprehend the big picture, they make better decisions concerning their own piece of the action. This book will tell you how to accomplish that.

•People come to work as whole people, i.e., they consist of bodies, minds, and spirits. When organizations fail to engage the whole of their employees, the organization’s performance invariably suffers but when leaders create organizations that bring out the best in people, the sky is the limit with respect to goal achievement. We will show you how others have done this.

What’s a Strategy? What is Strategy Execution?

This is a book about strategy execution, it address what must be done in turning business intentions into reality. Before going too far, though, it is important also to say what this book is not. This is not a book on how to create strategy. There are many other books that address that.

Since we’ll use the word repeatedly, let’s explain what we mean by “strategy.”

The word strategy is used in many different ways—and this is part of the strategy execution problem. Summarizing the various uses of the word strategy in business, McGill University business school’s Henry Mintzberg observes that we use the word strategy in four different ways, what he calls “The 4 P’s of Strategy.” A strategy is a PLAN, it’s most common usage, but the term also refers to a competitive POSITION, a PERSPECTIVE on what it takes to succeed in a given marketplace, and a set of PLOYS or stratagems that one employs to gain competitive advantage.

Consulting Wikipedia, we find that the word strategy comes from the Greek and has military origins. Indeed, the word emerges from the Greek word strateg, which means military commander. In popular usage, strategy most often means the set of actions (causes) that are calculated to lead to a given result (effect).

Wikipedia is also helpful in distinguishing strategy from tactics:

In military terms, tactics is concerned with the conduct of an engagement while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked. In other words, how a battle is fought is a matter of tactics: whether it should be fought at all is a matter of strategy.

We used to think that any well-written statement of an organization’s strategy was good enough. In some cases, an organization’s strategy was a simple list of “To Do’s,” in other cases, it was a vague set of aspirations or values. In a majority of cases, the strategy was a PowerPoint deck full of broad statements that clarified little.

In recent years, we have raised our standards considerably when it comes to what constitutes a strategy because most implementation problems begin there. We now believe that to succeed, an organization must have an executable strategy, one that takes into account financial results, the customer results that will lead to them, and a set of organizational objectives that each require. Strategies do not exist in a vacuum. They must reflect the nature of the system that has to implement it and how that system—the organization—must function to manifest the intentions behind the strategy.

As you will learn later, we employ two tools in our work with clients, each of which contribute immeasurably to the creation of executable strategies and to strategy execution itself: 1) strategy maps, and 2) principles of organization design as articulated by Amy Kates and Jay Galbraith. In combination, the two tools provide the intellectual discipline required of a rigorous planning and execution process. We will tell you how to use both tools in this book.

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