Strategy

Today’s competitive environment demands that organizations take disciplined action. But, disciplined action is not possible without disciplined thought, specifically, strategic choice. Choice about what you will and will NOT do. According to strategy expert Michael Porter, the essence of strategy is “deciding what not to do.”

Sustainable success requires being different in ways that matter to customers. Answering three questions will determine your strategic difference.

• What will make us different?
• What do what have a passion for?
• What drives our economic engine?

Execution

Executing your strategy is a universal challenge.

• An astonishing 90% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution.
• Only 5% of employee’s understand their corporate strategy.
• Only 37% of an employee’s time goes toward strategic projects. The rest is waste.
• If your number of employees grow 8x’s, the number of possible lines of communication grows 117x’s. The complexity from your growth makes execution exponentially more difficult.

Strategy execution is hard for a variety of reasons, but it is not rocket science. You simply need a system to manage it.

“It’s better to have grad-B strategy and grade-A execution than the other way around.” – Michael Porter

Holistic Approach

Two previous studies*, involving over 2000 organizations over ten years, provide compelling evidence that organizations that effectively implement a systematic, organization-wide approach to managing all key aspects of the business perform better. The first study found that the compound growth rates in earnings were more than double those of the control firms over four years after implementation, and about 75% in terms of compound sales. Here are a few key findings:

• It is not the ‘brand’ of the systematic approach you use that matters. What matters is that you HAVE a system.
• Industry, size, country, culture didn’t significantly change the results. The principles involved in good management processes apply to all types of organizations.
• The biggest challenge is not the development (or selection) of a management system, it is implementing and sustaining the implementation.

*”Don’t Count TQM Out,” by Hendrix and Singhal in Quality Progress Magazine, April 1999  
“Does Quality Still Pay?” by Zhang and Xia in Production and Operations Management, January 2013

Fight the never-ending challenge of executing strategy

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