Initiatestrategyimplementation

Strategic management is both a system and process to deal with dynamic and iterative planning and execution continuum.

We are at the intersection of industry age and digital era; the knowledge economy and creativity economy, the enterprises today need to become more open and responsive, the strategy management is multidimensional and multipath-driven. Execution is more difficult due to its complexity and the culture or resistance. 

Many companies spend a significant portion of time formulating rock solid strategies, but execution does not get the same attention which leads to misalignment with business objectives and not achieving the expected results. In practice, perhaps it takes a short time to develop a good enough strategy, but it takes months or years to execute it effectively.

How does the leadership team deploy the initiatives? Fundamentally, strategy management is about diagnosing crucial problems and setting priorities to solve them smoothly. Thus, any strategic business initiatives should be viewed as an "opportunity" for producing great products/service to delight customers, improving employee productivity, or optimizing costs. If the organization is faced with fierce competition, the management needs to clarify their unique business advantage by checking: How the business initiative differentiates the organization from its major competitors? Are they competing for best quality, cost advantage or efficient value chain? Can their processes do what they promise? Are people competitive enough to accomplish their work effectively? Etc.

Specifically, it’s important to look for business initiatives which will directly benefit external end customers, improve business competencies and in-turn bring in increased revenue. developing a compelling strategic business case which describes the business initiative’s benefits and costs flow is especially critical when an initiative is difficult to monetize. Also, effective business initiatives require the highest risk-taking at a strategic value chain; including investments and manageability.

To what levels in the organization have the initiatives been communicated: The top reason why strategy implementations fail is because they were not communicated smoothly to lubricate the organizational hierarchy or they were not actionable from the get-go. Oftentimes, the mistake that most organizations make in this regard is to fail translating the high-level language of strategy into the professional language of the various staff specialisms. Thus, employees cannot connect their daily tasks with the strategic goals that businesses intend to achieve; statistically, the majority of employees do not know what their strategy is. Good communication is based on expertise, contextual understanding, and deep insight, to avoid “lost in translation” syndrome. At senior leadership level, abstraction often enables an agreement; open your mind – listen carefully, decide timely, and act step-wisely.

Communication effectiveness sets culture tones to accelerate strategy execution and drives the long term business competency. However, in many traditional organizations, the audience is often the homogeneous group who gets used to hierarchical style of communication, it often lacks a strong feedback process to provide invaluable input for making timely adjustment of the strategy. So, respect your audience's cognitive diversity, and try to send the message which appeals to them empathetically. You need to tailor what you say when you say it, and how to say it to the audience. With hyper diversity today, strategic communication is not the top-down one-way street, but more open and interactive to bridge gaps and connect the minds. It should embrace inclusiveness, contextualization, creativity, to enforce trust and accountability. The goal is to motivate the team with common sets of values, goals, objectives, and pull the organization in the right direction for unlocking organizational performance.

What tools, processes, and structures are used to integrate the entire strategy enunciation and implementation process to achieve the common strategic objectives: Strategy and execution are not as different processes but as an integral part of strategy management. Strategy execution is a capability-based management process followed by a series of actions. It needs to break down outdated processes, and reconfigure different pieces of components to shape differentiated capabilities.

So important business processes need to be reviewed regularly, refined regularly, and are transparent across the business for improving organizational maturity. Forward-looking organizations work proactively to dismantle business bureaucracy, experiment with different types of organizational structures, continue consolidating, modernizing, and optimizing processes, to enforce business alignment, enablement, and collaboration. Business architecture can be used for strategic road mapping and planning. What gets measured, gets managed; the process performance indicators could link to strategy, to make progress on the percentage of strategic initiatives in the total capability development portfolio.

Strategic management is both a system and process to deal with dynamic and iterative planning and execution continuum. Without a clear vision and strategic planning, leaders often miss the big picture and become complacent, getting stuck at the “keeping the light on” mode. Stakeholder involvement and engagement always makes the difficult paths of strategy management easier to tread, the right level of sponsorship will help to get the resources needed for the execution, overcome organizational friction to make a smooth strategy management, and achieve the expected results.

Posted in: Execution,Strategy