Initiatives

Planning and implementation as iterative processes that balance each other can produce meaningful outcomes.

In the rapidly evolving businesses and complex ecosystems, making disruptive change is critical but challenging for the company’s long term survival and thriving. Unclear strategic planning perhaps misleads the organization in the wrong direction. 

Implementation is more difficult due to its complexity and culture of resistance. Organizational management has to keep reflecting, reinventing their practices to improve business performance.

 

Business implementation needs to be holistic, so each part of the organization, including all of the key functions must "put it all together" to be successful: In face of rapid change and frequent disruptions, uncertainty is the biggest problem in business today. Strategic planning needs to become a "living process" with regular evaluation, listening, revisiting and potential course correction. Sometimes when strategies change, organizations have to build dynamic capability to respond to changes promptly.

In the respect of gaps between strategy and implementation, engage the whole organization in knowing and understanding the direction and planning of the business; set the choice as the basis for strategic positioning - not only deciding what you are going to do but also what you definitely are not going to do. Create different business proposals of options and opportunities, engage employees, motivate people to solve problems in alternative ways, build the momentum and increase the tempo of business execution.

Organizational performance acceleration means to speed up; building the business competency to enhance long-term growth and prosperity: It is important that business management has objectivity and humility to realize that their hard processes are outdated, soft business elements such as communication or culture are ineffective, they need to keep consolidating, modernizing, integrating, innovating, and optimizing, pushing the boundaries of business improvement.

With today’s business dynamic, the organizational operation should be refined to the point that it can adapt to changing business demands in a timely fashion. Speeding up implies orchestrating strategy implementation in a synchronous way. Organizations need less process and more cross-functional connection, build differentiated competencies that provide opportunities to create unique business value structurally.

It is important to discover unexpected connections between the business and its eco-environment, and manage an iterative planning-implementation continuum smoothly: The functional, industrial or geographical boundaries are blurred, good businesses will always be seeking and embracing the influences beyond their own company. Understanding the organization via an ecosystem lens makes it possible to allow the organization to explore changes in all directions and broaden their ecosystem influence. Great companies can ride learning curves and expand their ecosystem via deliberate planning.

Leading organizations plan and develop their ecosystem and reach the inflection point to adjust the turning potion to make breakthroughs. Come out with fresh ideas or solutions that they can be provocative, passionate about, and courageous enough to implement in new ways. Organizations can scale up their change efforts, treat customers, a variety of stakeholders, and industry ecosystem participants as active agents to deal with complex problems collaboratively and harmonize organizational maturity.

The business leaders and their team cannot afford to be unprepared for the challenging task of facing uncertainty. The problem is not uncertainty, rather, it is unpreparedness towards efficient handling of uncertainty. The planning and implementation as iterative processes that balance each other can produce meaningful outcomes. Business leaders need to work across-lines, forecast emerging trends, integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments, achieve innovative forms of competitive advantage given path dependencies and market positions, and optimize business performance constantly.

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