The Language of Strategy 2 Execution

Curling in Abidjan, Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire) Africa circa 19823
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Country Experiences, Life Lessons & Execution on July 31st, 2006

This the second installment sharing a personal work experience having worked in over 45 countries. One picture that keeps coming back to me is about execution in the Cote d’Ivoire. (Don’t worry, no one dies).

I was a project manager for Raytheon in the early 1980’s. The airport manager for Air Afrique in the Ivory Coast was one of my clients. I spent about 3 months installing an airport departure control system for their main airport. French is the local language, which I spoke well, but with a limited vocabulary. But, one day my language skills completely failed me. My client also owned a restaurant and part of the deal was that I would eat all evening meals there. This particular evening there were a large number of French colleagues, their wives and my host. We were having a wonderful time, and with a few glasses of wine, my French was almost fluent. I was excited to tell them that I’d made the most fantastic discovery that day. There was Curling in Abidjan.

The Intercontinental Hotel had connected to it, a skating rink. I was told that, at that time, it was the only skating rink in all of Africa. Not only that, but it also had markings under the ice for Curling! Every second Tuesday a group of expats gathered and played curling. Beyond that, I was at a loss how to explain the game in French. There was no other option. With great excitement I invited my dinner table to come to the next curling bonspiel two weeks hence.

Here is what the Duluth Curling Club says about curling: “The strategy of positioning rocks as the end develops is extremely subtle, and is what makes curling a lifelong obsession for some people. It has been called “chess on ice”. … Above all else, curling is game of skillful execution of strategy.” That’s right Curling is a game of skillful execution of strategy. I hadn’t known that my years of curling in my teens would be a foreshadowing of my life work!

I had a trip back to Amsterdam, where I was living, and secured the right footgear for my grand entry into the world of African curling. I arrived at the rink duly attired and was made Skip of my team of four, which meant I was the last to throw a rock. (see the photo). I’m sure that I had an audience of fifty locals and expats. Many of them were ready with cameras to capture my first rock thrown in Africa. I have to say that I was excited and confident of my skills. Six other players each threw two rocks before it was my turn. As skip, I had demonstrated my strategic abilities and had created a difficult situation for my competing skip. It was now my turn to execute. I made my way with great speed, and elegance down the ice, pushing with one foot and sliding with the other.
As I prepared to squat down into the “hack” to take my shot, I took one last look at my audience before squatting down to execute, to throw my stone, and achieve our team’s strategy.

The next thing I heard was roaring laughter. As I had squatted down to take my first shot, my pants split with a great ripping sound. If you look at the photo, you can actually see a small sliver of white in a strategic location. That is where a cool breeze confirmed what had just happened. There was nothing to do about it, except continue playing amid the flashing of the cameras my friends had all brought. You might have even seen the reflection of my red face in the ice that day.

Curling; it’s all about strategy and execution. Sometimes execution takes some unusual turns. As far as I know they’re still playing curling in Abidjan.

The Language of Strategy 2 Execution Blog Manifesto0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Business Transformation, Challenges, Performance Improvement, Organization Change, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Expectations, Qualities of Execution, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Guiding Principles, Failure Statistics, Measures of Success, Strategy, The Language of Strategy to Execution on July 29th, 2006

“Strategy 2 Execution” is defined as the single most critical process of an organization. In this context it is not a series of processes that ultimately take you from strategy to execution. This is the overall process. I also use the acronym S2E for it.

I wanted to create a message for first time visitors. It will be kept as a permanent link on the list on the right side of the page. I wanted to set a high bar for what the content was for the Blog. In the following I set out the need for a break-through in successful execution of strategy. I also set out what tests, such a solution has to pass.

Thank you in advance for any way that you contribute to that ‘quest’, whether it is through comments to the postings or by taking advantage of any of the ideas introduced here.

We all have something that is keeping us awake at night. Current capabilities and resources don’t seem to be enough to ensure certainty of successful execution. We have to rely on resources outside our control for our success. Surveys would claim that strategic programs fail well over 50% of the time.

No country or functional group has cornered the market on successful execution. Over the past 30 years I have worked or lived in over 45 countries. I have provided services in management consulting, strategy formulation, business and IT transformations, large program delivery, sales and engineering management. Failure is high everywhere.

A break-through solution that provides a step improvement is needed. Improvement efforts that include book and magazine articles by experts, methodologies, and standards seem to be providing only incremental improvement. They are largely providing high-level leadership ideas or focus on narrowly defined functional areas. We must work on Strategy 2 Execution as a single critical process. There has not been a significant improvement in overall Strategy 2 Execution success in years.

Successful execution is defined as “having met expectations”. We need to be clear about what success is. The bar for what defines success must be set higher than ever. Anything less is an illusion of success.

Here are five tests for a Strategy 2 Execution break-through solution;

1. Improvement is Both Measurable and Intuitively Felt: The definition of success varies widely. What is success for one participant is a failure to another. Measurability is a must but execution is often stopped because sponsors don’t feel that expectations are being met. The solution must address leaders’ intuition as to whether success is being achieved and whether their expectations are being met.
2. It Provides Overall Improvement: Execution improvements in specific functional or process areas sometime occurs at the cost of overall Strategy 2 Execution success. Overall Strategy 2 Execution improvement is what is needed. This will only be achieved by providing a solution that integrates strategy to execution processes with the way people are organized and deployed to work. It must hold overall improvement at a higher value than improvement in a specific area.
3. It is Scalable, for All Types of Execution: We exist in a global, connected world. Any solution must enhance execution across different hierarchies, functional areas, companies, industries, governments and cultures. Major performance improvement will only occur if the solution is scalable starting from individual to multi-party to large scale execution. To be widely adopted, it must be able to be incrementally deployed and serve all types of execution.
4. It Survives Unpredictable Change: Nothing important can be completed anymore before its starting conditions and assumptions change in some significant way. Level of importance, organization design and available resource/ finances will change before execution is complete. Inevitable change is the norm. Strategy 2 Execution must survive this.
5. It Serves Everyone Equally: The solution must be practical, simple to understand and easy to adopt. To be sustainable it must be shared by choice, by all roles, at all levels of the organization. It must serve to get everyone on the same page using a common language that all participants share.

This is the opportunity for leaders of all types to share our passion, curiosity, experience, and simple-to-radical ideas for improving overall Strategy 2 Execution success. Welcome.

Failure to Meet Expectations Has a Major Impact on Success During and From Execution0
ronald.lamb posted in Business Transformation, Challenges, Performance Improvement, Organization Change, Expectations, Qualities of Execution on July 27th, 2006

Skip Reardon at Six Disciplines brings to light a McKinsey survey that sheds new light on what drives a successful transformation in organizational performance.  Respondents  reckoned  that their companies were conspicuously more effective than others at raising expectations about future performance, addressing short-term performance, engaging people at all levels of the organization, including a clear and coordinated program design, and making change visible –through, say, new IT tools or physical surroundings.  McKinsey also claims survey results show that emotions play a leading role in a performance transformation.

There is a strong link between expectations and emotions. (See research below carried out at the University of Colorado). 

I would claim that the right measure for execution success is having met expectations. If you agree with that, then you can see how important emotions are to success. The dark side of this equation is that missed expectations can lead to negative emotions that lead to poor execution. Sounds too theoretical, too academic? If you can’t find a way to improve management of expectations then execution will continue to be perceived as failure on a regular basis.

There are limitless types of performance expectations. Participants in a major change program might all agree on a high-level outcome for organization change /transformation. Even with that agreement performance expectations will vary widely in two unique areas.

• How transformation execution should be optimized during execution and
• What to optimize around for the transformation results achieved from execution

These two areas yield very different types of expectations. Expectations of how execution will be carried out during execution and what the result will be from execution lead transformation team members to very different types of behaviors.

When behaviors are conflicting between team members engaged in achieving the same transformation outcome, sparks fly, failure is the norm and careers can be lost.

Expectations of Performance During Execution
During transformation execution, participants and those funding it can differ wildly on how to optimize. That is, whether the execution of the transformation is proceeding;

• too quickly or slowly (optimized for speed),
• with enough concern for risk factors (optimized for certainty of success),
• in a way that provides visible, measurable progress (optimized to provide clarity and measurability),
• to reduce expenditure of  financial and fixed resources, and management time) (optimized for best use of resources/ low cost)

Conflict During Execution
A number of these from the list above are types of conflicting expectations. One group might be expecting to see the transformation occur as quickly as possible and another group expects it to occurs with as much organizational buy-in as possible. These two “Qualities of Execution” are usually conflicting. Change teams will execute in a way that optimizes one or more of these Qualities of Execution. Someone optimizing execution for speed will execute the same project quite differently than someone who is optimizing for certainty. There are very different behaviors involved in executing for speed versus for certainty. Which is the right behavior for the transformation manager? Someone who crosses all the t’s and dot’s all the i’s (e.g. a process/ details oriented behavior), or a Captain Kirk, a transformation manager who cuts corners, makes bold moves, “goes where no man has gone before”. Such variations in behavior during execution of a major change program lead to conflict and dysfunctional behavior among team members.

Expectations of Performance From Execution:
These same participants in the transformation have their own expectations from execution. Sure, they may all absolutely sign-on for the highest level change outcome, but during transformation, participants and those funding it can differ wildly on what to optimize around. That is, whether the transformation will result in;

• the greatest size of change possible (optimize for the greatest amount of transformation change)
• the change / transformation be long lasting (optimized for sustainability)
• an exceptionally high level of commitment to the change / transformation (optimized for buy-in)
• the change /transformation having the broadest impact (optimized for reach)

Conflict From Execution
A number of these from the list above lead to different and sometimes conflicting expectations.  For example, while working on initiatives to achieve an outcome, you might have team members working to maximize the amount of performance change.  At the same time you might have other team members working on the same outcome but in a way that would achieve it at the lowest cost.  The team behaviors by both groups would be quite different. You can imagine the type of conflict that can occur when there are different expectations for what to optimize on from execution.

Emotions and Performance are Impacted When Expectations Are Not Being Met
When expectations aren’t being met, emotions start to erupt.  The higher a team member’s expectations (e.g. Gee, I really thought we were on the same page here!) the bigger the emotional impact.  According to McKinsey, while respondents reported negative and positive moods in roughly equal proportions, more of the top performers reported experiencing the positive emotions - especially focus and enthusiasm.  It doesn’t take much to figure out that those two emotions can have a major impact on successful execution of any organizational change and transformation.

Here is some research on the connection between emotions and expectations. It is somewhat obvious, but nonetheless supports the research by McKinsey and my contention that you have to manage expectations for successful execution.
Management of Expectation can be accomplished using the “Qualities of Execution” approach.

Olympians’ Emotions Greatly Affected By Prior Expectations Says CU Professor from PhysOrg.com Olympians’ expectations going into the games often affect how thrilling their victories or agonizing their defeats will be, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder professor.

[…]

The Language of Strategy to Execution0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), The Language of Strategy to Execution on July 24th, 2006

The Language of Strategy to Execution is an execution improvement methodology that I’ve created. It is continuing to evolve and mature.

It provides value:

• to anyone who is responsible for the execution of some critical targeted outcome.
• when currently available resources and capabilities aren’t enough to give confidence in success.

I frequently get asked for a short document to describe it. Click the following link to download a one page .pdf introduction.

The Meaning of Words is Critical in Execution - The Glossary is now added1
ronald.lamb posted in Challenges, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Tower of Babel, Glossary on July 23rd, 2006

People tell me that I’m much more precise with words than most people. They’re right especially in the world of execution. This weekend’s contribution to the Blog is a glossary. I guarantee that you’ll find some words and definitions that you’ve never seen before. A common set of words for everything from Strategy to Execution has been missing. Everyone from CEO’s and Government leaders to Project Managers and Team Members need to have a common language when working on anything from Strategy to Execution.

To give an example, many organizations I work with use the following words completely interchangeably. They are not the same. I’ll share more in future posting how the confusion or willingness to interchange these words have a direct connection to why execution fails to meet expectations more than 50% of the time.

• Action
• Task
• Project
• Outcome
• Work
• Objective
• Goal
• Result
• Initiative
• Program

You can see the impact if a team was committed to achieving a particular outcome as compared to if they were committed to achieving a particular initiative. They might be quite successful in achieving the initiative, but not achieve the outcome that the initiative was put in place to achieve. On the other hand, if the team was committed to achieving a particular outcome, and the initiatives that they started with weren’t achieving the expected outcome, you can imagine that they’d change initiatives. That would be part of what they’d committed to. The difference in success or failure is immense.

Using Strategy as a Weapon Will Get You Nowhere0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Guiding Principles, Strategy on July 20th, 2006

In many organizations the word “strategy” is vaguely understood or not defined at all. The creation of strategy is usually owned and defined by upper management. The strategy itself is often further represented by the major plans that are defined by teams at any level of the organization. That one condition is critical since:
- Strategy and execution occur at all levels within the organization.
- What is important is to be able to take strategies that are created or imposed from any level in an organization, combine them and execute them so that they meet expectations.

Since I would claim that execution happens at all levels of an organization, there has to be a link between any top level strategy and all the execution that occurs.

It is worth a pause though to ask yourself whether you’ve ever been asked “What is your strategy for achieving …….”? You can draw your own conclusions, but I would say that not only execution happens at all levels, but so does strategy. That poses something of a challenge if you agree with my assessment that most people would have a hard time telling you what a strategy is, or even what is a strategy and what is a tactic. How can an organization successfully execute a strategy when there isn’t much confidence in what the word strategy means? This little dilemna has to be solved.

In its worse sense, the word “strategy” can be used as a weapon to exclude people. Just like IT people can use language and acronyms that shut out most non-IT people, senior business people can be quite intimidating when they talk about strategy.

How many people within an organization would be brave enough to enter into a discussion about strategy with the senior management team? As a young engineer, I remember feeling embarrassed and somewhat littler during a management meeting. The subject was a business problem, which might have had a strategy impact. I thought I had something to contribute and spoke up. Someone more senior said, in a not so polite way, that I was talking tactics, not strategy! That shut me up and shut me down. How can you argue against such a thing? I’d have been able to stand up for myself I would have had to have read books by Mintzberg, Porter or some other writer on strategy. For me, for the outcome I understood and for what I was contributing, my definition of strategy was sufficient. Good or bad, my contribution was lost.

In retrospect, my contribution might well have been a tactical recommendation. What was lost was the connection and ability to translate my tactic, and its execution, to the achievement of some previously agreed upon targeted outcome. You can derive targeted outcomes from any strategy.

What Do We Do?
If we allow ourselves to more loosely define strategy, then we can make the whole discussion around strategy and execution much more inclusive. That is, allow people at all levels of the organization to own and describe their strategy in a way that can be commonly understood. When it is combined with all other parts of the organization, it achieves the corporate strategy.

Sounds great, but wouldn’t this lead to chaos? Not if we find a way to tie all the pieces together in a shared way. This Blog will address how to tie all the pieces of strategy to execution together, but in a way that has a common shared understanding. We are going to get everyone on the same page. This is a critical shift to achieving greater success.

I think most people can understand quite quickly the concept of a targeted outcome. It’s something you aspire to achieve. It represents a performance gap of some kind. You put in place initiatives or projects to achieve targeted outcomes.

I would suggest that for most organizations moving from strategy quickly to targeted outcomes, makes the whole strategy much more accessible and allow everyone to get on the same page. The targeted outcomes can be written in short descriptions, using plain language. Acronyms need to be used very sparingly. They need to be expanded with definitions 100% of the time. Otherwise, with new additions to the team, you will never get everyone on the same page.

This Blog will be covering a lot more about translating strategy to targeted outcomes. A great targeted outcome is to arrive at a level where for any strategy everyone understands its targeted outcomes, in the same way, across the whole organization. Only then will everyone be on the same page, and everyone will be able to contribute to a synchronized execution.

Remember, using strategy as a weapon to divide, or make anyone big and someone else small, will get you nowhere.

The STRATEGY List: Reasons for Execution Failure0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Failure Statistics, Strategy, Top x-Lists on July 19th, 2006

Time to have some fun and start looking at reasons for success and failure. Here are some of comments I’ve had about strategy and the realationship to success and failure. I’ve seen some crazy reactions to “Our strategy …..”

Please help out and fill-in the blank to “Our strategy ……” on a comment. You can also comment or add your personal experiences with any of them.

I think we’ll add a “Twighlight Zone” category for great strategy to execution failure anecdotes.

If I can figure out how to do it, I’ll add a way to vote on which ones remind you of your organization.

1. We don’t have a strategy.
2. The strategy isn’t communicated.
3. The strategy isn’t understood.
4. Our strategy is so secret; no one knows what it is.
5. The strategy keeps changing.
6. Strategy is a bad word at our organization.
7. We do the strategy thing once a year.
8. I don’t know what strategy is and am afraid to say so.
9. Strategy is for those people in the ivory tower. We do the real work.
10. Our strategy is what those consultants made up. I hope they leave soon so we can go back to real work.
11. Our strategy seems to claim we’re going to conquer the world. We have trouble tying our shoes.
12. Our strategy is what the boss says it is.
13. You can find our strategy in those three inch thick binders over in the boss’ office. In fact you can find our last three strategies from various consulting firms, in the various binders that you’ll find there.

Execution Failure Statistics and How Success is Defined - It’s worse than I thought0
ronald.lamb posted in Organization Change, Expectations, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Failure Statistics, Measures of Success on July 17th, 2006

I was talking to the V.P. of IT projects for a multi-billion dollar financial services firm. We were talking about strategic project failure figures. We’d both seen studies showing failure rates pretty consistently at over 50%.

He told me that their firm hadn’t had a significant failure in over five years. I was astounded and impressed. After a failure that he placed at close to a $100M write-off, their firm had put in place the most strict procedures and approval gates that I’d ever seen. I suggested that it would be great to create a short case study on how they had managed to achieve such a success rate. To maximize the impact of the case I wanted to include a perspective from their business partners. I asked him whether his business partners would also claim that there had been no significant failures in the past five years. His answer was, “I have no idea”.

Scary, and no he wasn’t pulling my leg. It is still possible to find an organization that is so insular, so full of functional silos that someone at a V.P. level can declare success within their area without any consideration to the over-all success of execution. This organization’s performance measures and complex matrixes reinforce individuals to define success and failure to within only the scope that they control.

This type of corporate culture, this type of organizational thinking is one of the core reasons for execution failure. I first ran into the performance claim of “It’s ok leaving here”, when I was a young customer service representative working in Central America helping get airline communications networks online. The technician at Pan American or KLM or Eastern Airlines headquarters would tell me the data signal was “Ok leaving here” . That was his way of saying “ I have no more responsibility for successful connection between me and where you are”. In other words, his definition of success was strictly defined by what he could control.

This is the first posting for much more on the subject of how success is defined. It will also be a focus around how we are fundamentally organized and measured. We need to work, regardless of the organization structure, to achieve success in execution. I’ll also be soliciting input and links to other studies or examples of failure statistics, how success and failure are measured.

You’ll be seeing more of my recommended solutions for that challenge. Please stay and comment, if this is of particular interest to you.

Mexico: Have you ever been to Acapulco? Do you know how to drive a stick shift?0
ronald.lamb posted in Country Experiences, Life Lessons & Execution on July 16th, 2006

This is the first of a number of personal stories that I’m going to share in this Blog. I’ll look for links to execution, but in large, they’re going to be about the wonderful experiences that I’ve had working around the world over the past 30 years.

By a set of coincidences, my first job after university was working for Raytheon in the airline industry. I caught the airline industry bug and loved the life that it offered. For many years I traveled, worked and lived all over the world. I’ve long since expanded my work experience beyond the travel industry, but it was my ticket to the world. At last count I’ve worked or lived in over 45 countries.

One of the most generous work experiences I ever had occurred very early in my working career. It had a major impact on the way I treated my customers/clients and as a result how they were able to execute.

I was working as a customer engineer for Raytheon in Mexico City. We were automating airports and reservation systems across the country for AeroMéxico and Mexicana Airlines. I was just about to step into the twilight zone of ultimate customer experience.

As part of this Blog, I thought it would be fun to let you get to know some of the wonderful people I’ve met all over the world. They’ve had a profound affect on my insights into the execution of strategy. I’ve met some wild people and been in a number of tight spots too as wars started or insurgencies boiled over.

Acapulco Mexico

It was 1976, I was 22 years old, and had just flown in to Acapulco from Mexico City to fix some sort of computer problem at the airport. It is no small thing to have the check-in system for the main airline in Acapulco to stop working. I managed to get it going fairly quickly and was finished by about 5 pm. The airport manager, a cosmopolitan looking man about 35 was very relieved. As the chaos started to recede he asked what my plans were. It was a Friday and I’d left straight from the office to the airport with just what I was wearing. I had just planned on taking the next flight back to Mexico City.

I’d just started with Raytheon and this had been one of my first jobs as a customer service engineer. Hearing that, he told me that there was no way that I was leaving that evening without him having the chance to thank me. He insisted on taking me out on the town that evening. It was to be a welcome to AeroMéxico, who was to be my main client for the next few years. Now I have to say, I’d never met him before, and this was one of my first business trips anywhere with my new job with Raytheon. I thought what a nice welcome. I was pretty dirty from having worked on their computer (they were open to the elements in those days), so wasn’t sure what to do between 5 pm and when he would meet me. In Acapulco, going out for the evening means starting at 11 pm at the earliest.

He must have seen my blank look and his face brightened! “Ah, that’s right, it’s Friday, and there won’t be any hotel rooms in town (Acapulco) tonight or tomorrow. I can see your problem”. He took out a business card and just wrote on the back of it. “Please look after Sr. Lamb”, and then his signature. He then told me to go to one of the biggest luxurious hotels in Acapulco and show them the card.

As I looked at the card I tried to imagine as a 22 year old, going to one of the most expensive hotels in Acapulco. I knew there would be no rooms, and they would cost more than I had. I was to show them the card and had no idea what would occur. He then brightened again and said, “You don’t have a car do you”? Of course I didn’t. He said, “You know this is Friday, there won’t be a single car available to rent to get into central Acapulco”. It was about a 40 minute drive along a windy coastal road in those days. “Can you drive a stick shift”? I could, but had no idea where the conversation was going. He reached into his pockets and threw me the keys to his car. “Here, take mine, I’ll get a ride in with one of the other employees later. Show the card to the hotel check-in desk and they’ll find you one of the ‘non-existent’ rooms and give you an airline employee discount. Take the card to the gift shop and get some clothes for going out, and get a bathing suit and enjoy the pool”. He then headed back to the chaos that was now receding and I headed off along the windy road in his Volkswagen Beetle. All of this and he’d never met me before. I finally made it around one last curve between the coastal mountains and Acapulco Bay to see the skyline of fancy hotels. Boy was I elated.

Everything occurred as he said. I got a room immediately like I was their most important customer. I got some clothes at the gift shop with a steep airline employee discount. There was a message waiting for me that he had to go home first and would meet me later at one of Acapulco’s famous discos. I arrived there to see a long line of the rich and famous. I was again to use his business card with his short introduction on the back. I made my way nervously towards a big tough looking guard at the door, who looked at me, a gringo, with a stern look. He took the card and twisted it around in his huge hands. He looked back at me and you might have imagined that we were long lost cousins for the way he greeted me and ushered me in. I was pretty much in shock at what had been happening for the past few hours. He arrived an hour later and we had a wonderful time. It seemed every beautiful woman at that disco knew him and wanted to stop by and say hello.

I was pretty shy at the time, but have to say that as a young Canadian, just starting a new job, in a new country, with no girlfriend at the time, things were looking up.

p.s. Was my job in Mexico like this all the time? I have to say that in retrospect that was just the beginning of a wonderful ride.

Did this experience affect the way that I treated AeroMéxico as a client? You bet it did.

I would do anything at any time to day or night to make them happy. As a customer, you too can have an incredible impact on the way your vendors or partners treat you. Is that important in execution? There is no question that I ran faster, tried harder and didn’t give up on the toughest problems that occurred while AeroMéxico was my customer. As a result they were able to execute and achieve their targeted customer outcomes. And I loved just about every minute.

I had many exceptional experiences while living in Mexico and some really terrible ones. It’s interesting as I reflect on it. The really terrible experiences were actually most often with foreigners who were also living in Mexico at the time. I can say that I came to truly love Mexico, its people, its culture and will always have a special connection to it. My wife and I consider the possibility of retiring there.

My plan is to use Sundays as a time to write a story about a different country and how it has affected my thoughts on execution. They won’t always be as happy as this one. I’ve been in some pretty scary places too and plan to share those experiences too.

Only improve a Strategy-to-Execution sub-process if it will improve end-to-end strategy to execution1
ronald.lamb posted in Challenges, Organization Change, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Guiding Principles on July 15th, 2006

We’re all experts at something. If we get hired or promoted to a new role, one of the first things that we do is to look around for what’s broken. We assume that’s our job to fix what’s broken.

The whole concept of accountability is that we’re given an area of control and asked to optimize it for success for the organization. We make the changes to fix or maximize the success in our own area of responsibility. There’s one problem though; very rarely does anyone have responsibility for the success of end-to-end strategy to execution. Did the change any individual made, actually improve the whole process? An expression that I hear is, “Did all boats rise”?

What I find (consulting for many organizations and my own direct experience), is that ‘improving’ a sub-process or the area that we have total control over, breaks the historic links to other parts of the overall strategy to execution process. The change may actually set back the total strategy to execution (S2E) process of the organization. Think of the old game of telephone. You sit in a circle and whisper a message from one person to the next. The person at the end of the circle, the last one to hear the message, says what they heard out loud. It’s usually pretty funny to hear the difference between the final word and the initially whispered word. Think of a strategy being conveyed and executed across an organization and how it gets corrupted as it goes along. Now add the ideas in the game of telephone that one person has decided that they hear better, when they hum at the same time as listening. Now add that another person, decides they whisper better when they’re hopping up and down. Let everyone keep adding their own improvements for listening and whispering and you get my idea. There’s no one saying hold on now, let’s take a look at whether each of these ‘improvements’ are helping us get the right message at the end of the circle.

What is missing is the need to have someone or a group take ownership of a continuously updated point of view of the health of the end to end strategy to execution (S2E) process. If someone wants to ‘improve’ their area, there should be some higher-level understanding and decision as to whether that change will ‘help all boats rise”. Does the change take into consideration the way other parts of the organization interact with the area that wants to create change?

This will be a subject area that I’ll be posting more about over time. I don’t think many organizations have any formal continuous assessment of the quality of their S2E process. If I were a CEO or head of a large organization, I’d want to have an objective understanding of the weakess points in the S2E process and allow improvements to occur there first.

Ward Success Systems - Different ways to think about coaching for success.0
ronald.lamb posted in Other Success Systems on July 14th, 2006

I was on my way to my car having come from a regular consultants’ networking breakfast hosted by Ron Raumer at the Lafayett Park Hotel. There was a sign in front of a conference room “Ward Success Systems”.

Eighty or so bright eyed, alert looking men and women were having a break and so I took the opportunity to walk inside. A number of videos with names like “Success Principles”, “Ultimate Success”, and “Go for the Goal” were on a counter at the back. After a brief introduction I was invited to stay and listen.

I was shocked. All the attendees were Chiropractors! There is a motivational market niche that is so focused that it supports just Chiropractors. Not only that, but these Chiropractors had flown in from all over Canada and the US. Not only that, but the featured speaker knew many of them by name.

The messages were very short and sweet. The part that I sat through was about ‘better thinking’. I won’t try to describe it further than to say that it was compelling and clearly held the attention of his entire audience.

What a wonderful man is this Charles Ward of Ward Success Systems. How do I come to this assessment after a hour of listening to him? It was the testimonials of a number of people in attendance. I was shocked to see that many of those in attendance had had Dr. Ward as their coach for up to twenty years. This was clearly not a ‘take the motivation pill’ and then find that it wears off after a while. No, these people had been in a coach/mentor relationship for years and getting value from it.

I was sitting next to a married couple, the husband nodding and clearly agreeing with what Dr. Ward was talking about. He and his wife were later introduced to the group as the parents of one of Dr. Ward’s assistants and that he was a local minister. I could see how much of what Dr. Ward was saying would be valuable to those in attendance in any house of God.

I got to see another way of conveying how to achieve success. While I only got to see / hear the tip of the iceberg, his focus seems to be on providing group and individual coaching with a Playbook, and lots of motivational tapes.

I’m looking forward to following up with Dr. Ward to hear how he has managed to create such loyal clients over so many years to stay with him as they continue their quest to be successful Chiropractors.

CIO Round Table Handout on Business Transformation1
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Business Transformation, Challenges, CIO's on July 14th, 2006

I wanted to avoid rehashing for them the typical CIO topics around business alignment. There are gaps in what CIO’s focus on. I still find it hard to locate organizations that look at strategy to execution as an end-to-end process. CIO’s have the opportunity to provide the rigor methods and tools to allow an organization to integrate everything that goes on between strategy and execution. At the moment the process is fragmented and optimized to improve certain areas. Since business transformation is about tough, business-wide execution, the organization needs better methods and tools that work on a business-wide transformation scale.

Here is what I provided. The following is the text without the formatting. There is a link to the formatted handout at the bottom of this posting

Business Transformation (BT) is about:
• Creating a business vision for higher performance.
• Transforming when incremental change processes are not sufficient.
• Sustaining a step change in performance where value vastly outweighs execution costs

Unfortunately BT fails to meet CEO expectations more than 50% of the time.
Where does the problem lie?
• Vision and strategy are the primary domain of business leaders. BT strategies are usually well thought out but change over time.
• Execution is the domain of all, under project management. Project management and business alignment are mature sciences. Incremental improvements are the likely result here.
• Translation of strategy to execution Whose domain is this? Who has the capability to hold together end-to-end strategy to execution? Who can manage continuously changing requirements? CIO’s can step into the breach here.
BT is Not Business as Usual
• Skills and processes for transformation sized change are not often exercised.
• BT experience is usually unevenly distributed across the business. Failures will be unpredictably uneven, even in areas where success is most critical.
• Performance measures for BT don’t exist. Success may ultimately be measured by the sponsor’s expectations having being met.
• BT and business-as-usual commitments and performance targets must be met.
The CIO can directly improve failure rates.
The CIO can provide a business-wide approach, skills and tools that may make the difference in the continuous translation of strategy into execution.

The CIO can provide new capabilities to:
1. Keep Everyone on the Same Page
• Use IT logic and rigor to translate the BT strategy into a roadmap of targeted outcomes and initiatives.
• Make the BT vision understandable by all by distributing an easy to understand graphical representation of how success will be achieved.
• Show accountability for outcomes. Link outcomes to the initiatives and the hierarchy that support them.
• The occurrence and impact of change must be understood synchronously by all in the same way at the same time.
• Link status and operational documents to the outcomes they support.
2. Non-Politically Prioritize & Optimize
• Prioritize around highest value outcomes and resource constraints.
• Minimize execution conflicts. Optimize around targeted outcomes and the continuous trade-offs tied to perceived stakeholder expectations, management styles, and resource availability.
• Manage complexity in business budgets. They are pushed down to operating units. Provide transparency around the resources that span operating units. BT initiatives will be financially starved or overfed not necessarily according to importance.
3. Manage Changing Expectations
• Manage conflicting expectations where standard escalation processes are not designed for these non-standard operating procedure type of decisions.
• As execution time progresses, managers who hold the needed resources will change their perception on the relative value of the transformation. Project managers will continuously struggle to obtain necessary resources as opinions shift.

CIO’s can provide a Language for Business Transformation Execution.

[tags]business transformation,CIO,incremental change,step change,vision,strategy,translating strategy,execution,not business as usual,failure rate,everyone on the same page,prioritize,optimize,changing expectations,expectations,Language of strategy 2 execution,Language of Execution,What’s keeping you awake at night[/tages]

Business Transformation - Execution Challenges2
ronald.lamb posted in Business Transformation, Challenges on July 10th, 2006

A colleague of mine owns a consulting firm and holds a regular round table for area CIO’s. They come from medium and large firms in the San Francisco Bay area. This month’s session is being held with a focus on Business Transformation.

Meeting execution expectations during and resulting from a Business Transformation program is exceedingly difficult. I’m going to provide them with new options on how to increase their likelihood of success. My six years with Accenture’s strategy organization and many years of leading large scale change programs has shown me how difficult ’success’ is to achieve.

With normal projects, being on-time, on-scope, and on-budget may be sufficient. In large scale Business Transformation programs, normal operating procedures hardly apply. I’ll share some of those challenges below.

Business transformation is about achieving a new vision for the business. It is about acting on the knowledge that incremental change is no longer sufficient. It is about creating a sustainable step change where costs are vastly outweighed by the anticipated value.

Sounds good, let’s do it!
(uuhmmm, excuse me, but there are a few things you might want to consider first.)

• Business transformation tends to affect all parts of the business directly or indirectly, and in some important way.
• Since business transformation starts being vision based and not a regular part of day to day business, there are few agreed upon benchmarks or performance measures for people to work towards. Therefore “expectations being met” is a most realistic reflection of how success and failure will be measured. Unfortunately expectations as a measure of performance are notoriously hard to manage to.
• Business-as-usual commitments and performance targets still have to be met while the transformation is occurring
• To be sustainable, the transformation cannot be associated with one strong personality. It must have wide enough support that the departure or shift in attention by the top leadership won’t doom the transformation.
• Businesses don’t transform on a regular basis. The skills and processes to transform are not regularly exercised and transformation experience is usually unevenly distributed across the business.
• Business transformation is also about trade-offs on what to optimize. In the methodology that I’ve developed, I call these areas of optimization, “The Qualities of Execution™”. I’ll share more about this over time in this blog.
• 45- 75 % of strategic programs fail to meet CEO expectations.

Is it possible to meet expectations in large Business Transformation program?

I would claim that it is. I would also claim that current methods and tools will almost always leave you short. I think the studies that show 45 - 75 % of strategy programs fail is a a great indicator. That is why I’m dedicated to sharing my solution to provide new options in execution. I call my solution, my methodology and tools, the Language of Execution™.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting what needs to be in place to start moving a business from Hope to Certainty as they execute a major Business Transformation program.

Starting Point: Execution of strategy fails way too often.0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy on July 9th, 2006

Enough is enough. My personal experience of execution is that it fails way too often. Organizations are investing in strategies and program management that according to most studies fail more often than not. (More about these studies later)

What must be occurring is that this investment is giving only marginal improvements. This Blog is focused on discussing and creating a store of knowledge and best practices that can provide a step improvement in execution. It is no longer enough to create incremental improvement.

We need executives and program managers to contribute. Strategy to execution takes in all types of participants, from CEO’s to individual contributors. Most new ideas presented through training or literature are aimed at either ‘leaders’ or ‘team members’ but not both. This is a basic flaw and a root cause of failure. We need to understand execution of strategy in the same way regardless of role, seniority, or functional expertise. This Blog will only succeed if all types of participants provide input and challenge ideas.

This Blog is meant to provide you and me an opportunity to raise fresh ideas and seek highly critical points of view on the subject of sustainable step improvements in execution. Welcome to those of you who are distressed at current execution capabilities and are motivated to participate. Goodbye to those of you who don’t see any opportunity to contribute fresh thinking.

I don’t have anything against the training, authors, new practices that are currently popular. It is just that they are mostly aimed at improvement at some sub-level involving the execution of strategy. This approach seems to provide only incremental improvement.

We need a new way to improve the success rate of execution. I believe that can only be done by looking at overall execution of strategy. That is, strategy 2 execution (s2e) as a whole. I will leave it to others to improve the sub-components.

A Language for Execution 2 Strategy1
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy on July 9th, 2006

The purpose of this Blog is to provide a forum to share ideas and experiences that can lead to a sustained or predictable step improvement in the success rate of execution.

The phrase Strategy 2 Execution rather than Strategy to Execution is used when what is meant is the overall process of moving from Strategy all the way through to Execution. It is meant to distinguish itself from discussion around all the separate ’sub-processes’ that exist between strategy and successful execution. There is a wealth of knowledge and commentary about each of these ’sub-processes’. There is much less written and debated about overall Strategy 2 Execution.

The closest analogy to this is Supply Chain. Someone recognized that there were many small processes that work to move goods from the source to where they are used. They recognized that if you looked at all those small processes together as one big process, you could optimize in new ways and achieve significantly better results.

The focus is widely defined to cover execution of strategies, negotiations, sales, major change programs, social programs, etc. That is, execution of anything that can be translated into an critical targeted outcome.