The Concern with Strategy Execution

So many companies complain their business is littered with well thought through strategies that failed. Sometimes, strategic visions can be clear, they can be translated into operational chunks and leaders believe this is enough to ensure execution will work properly (Morgan et Al. 2007). Participants to one of The Market Shaping Institute recent workshop sincerely thought that delegating the strategic projects to functional experts would do: planning and budgeting, workforce alignment and best practice sharing could be enough to ensure a proper execution of the strategy.

There are many reasons to explain the knowing doing gap: Knowing “What” to do is not enough, you don’t want “talk” to substitute for “action”, memory can be a substitute for thinking, internal competition turns friends into enemies, (Pfeffer and Sutton, 1999)… This is why management committees should dedicate significant efforts into creating the conditions for strategy execution. We expect from senior leaders to create a compelling vision because the “Why” should come before the “How”. Strategy, we believe, benefits from being concretely converted into a programme portfolio before even thinking of a precise monitoring of this portfolio; One would expect project leaders to be named, milestones to be defined, and progress to be assessed. We have often observed that what is not measured is hardly monitored. It progressively became clear to the leadership team of our workshop that unless metrics are well defined, organisational alignment clarified and strategy reviews carried out, progress on the strategic agenda are left to chance. Our participants even stressed some managerial dimensions. There is no doing without mistakes, and our performance system does not do well with this idea. Our company is very political at the top. Internal rivalry is the consequence of managerial practices (performance ranking, reward systems, …), etc.

We found these ideas to be quickly identified. But to our great surprise, CEOs and general managers we recently talked to admitted that strategy execution remains one of their biggest concern. They keep on expecting from their project managers to provide clear business cases with which to make decisions, offer periodic progress reports, demonstrate their understanding of larger goals, remain responsive to changing environment, and be clear of what they expect when escalating a problem.

On their side, project managers were still expecting to get the support from their board through powerful sponsors that support the acquisition and retention of necessary resources, help navigate the organisational landscape, make decisions in real time, (and sometimes, make decisions at all), and advocate or help sell the case.

These aspects seemed to be considered when discussing well-known types of project such as product launch, communication campaigns or innovation processes. Rigour was however missing as soon as we talked about new challenges: how to simplify the organisation, how to digitalise processes, or how to accelerate go to market. Rigour was lost because of the perceived complexity of the projects (Benko & McFarlan, 2003). The cross functional dimensions of these challenges, the lack of framework, or the distant time horizon through which results could be expected were key barriers to implementing a rigorous strategy execution process. We suggest that rigor is precisely needed when projects get you navigate complex environments. As Eugène Delacroix, the French painter once suggested, execution should leave room for improvisation. But what do you want to improvise if you have no rigourous method.

References:

Benko, C. and F. W. McFarlan (2003). Connecting the Dots: Aligning Projects with Objectives in Unpredictable Times. Boston, Harvard Business School Press.

Morgan, M., et al. (2007). Executing your Strategy, Harvard Business School Press.

Pfeffer, J. and R. I. Sutton (1999). The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action. Boston, Harvard Business School Press.