Making strategy work

In today's world of rapid change, strategy cannot be separated from execution - it has to emerge from execution. You have to continually adjust strategy to fit new realities. But if your organisation isn't fast on its feet, you could easily go the way of Blockbuster or Borders.

As companies all over the world concentrate on revisiting, revising and remaking their strategies, they forget the next step, making sure the strategy is implemented. Billions of dollars are spent on brilliant ideas -- but not on brilliant results.

Strategy making is an elegant activity which engages the top management. It's a sophisticated process of collecting and analysing data, generating insight, and identifying smart ways to move forward.

Done in an academic fashion, tight logic in fluent language is the only glue needed to hold ideas together. Executives buy into the plan.

The strategists, confident in their intellectual prowess, quietly recede to the background.

Then the conflicts begin. Execution is a minefield. The clean and elegant logic of strategy gets dirty in the real world. Cross functional priorities clash. Speed is questioned, timelines get blown, and decisions stall.

Communication breaks down and the blaming environment sets in. It's never a question of whether these problems will occur. It's a question of when and to what degree.

Same camp

Strategists and executors are in two camps and getting into one camp is the way to bridge these two worlds. It's common sense. Unfortunately, it's far from common practice.

What typically happens is an awkward hand-off between the two. They don't engage the executors early and ask, "How will this actually work?"

The executors contribute to the trouble as well. Often they don't truly understand the thinking behind the strategy. They take it at face value and don't ask enough tough questions. When things fall apart, each points a finger at the other side.

Today, organisations need to constantly adapt to create and maintain competitive advantage and marketeers have to go beyond the traditional role to seek new ways to achieve strategic organisational change.

Execution

The basic step for a company to become more focused on execution or implementation is to create a culture of execution. How does one create such a culture? Let's look at some basic facts. First, it's a fact that culture affects behaviour.

An organisational culture include values, prescriptions on how to act, how to treat others, how to react to performance shortfalls and how to compete. These have a profound impact on behaviour.

A related fact, however, must also be kept in mind: Behaviour, over time, affects organisational culture. How, then, does one create a desired culture? By creating behaviour and performance programs that become an integral part of an organisation's way of doing things.

By creating and reinforcing behaviour and performance programs that affect the very essence of how organisations act and compete.

Create a culture of execution by developing and reinforcing behaviour that affects culture. It is important to design, reward and otherwise support right behaviour, those that are vital to make strategy work, to create and nurture a culture of execution.

Ask yourself, why strategy execution or implementation is viewed as a lower-level task in an organisation? Why assume that execution is a quick, one-shot decision or action and not a journey?

Why don't we believe that strategy execution is a process similar to strategy making? Is the organisational structure geared for effective execution? More importantly, how does one create a culture of execution?

Strategy and execution are about people. To create strategy we need innovative people and to execute we need leaders. Everything else is secondary.