The Language of Strategy 2 Execution

The Disconnect between Strategy and Execution2
ronald.lamb posted in Uncategorized, Execution of Strategy, Resource Management, Relative Importance, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Failure Statistics, The Language of Strategy to Execution on June 6th, 2007

There is not enough focused effort to address the gap between strategy and execution. George Ambler’s blog The Practice of Leadership, has found a great survey on the Disconnect between Strategy and Execution. This is a must read for anyone who is looking beyond easy answers. The survey is by OnPoint Consulting and hits a home run in its observations. Most organizations have a strategy that is at least adequate, with some being clear and inspiring. Most organizations have an execution capability with capable people using standard or best practices. Still 49% of firms surveyed see the gap in their ability to execute sound strategies. Of this 49% of firms, 64% don’t have confidence in their ability to close the gap. OnPoint provide a list of eight factors that they feel provide this strategy to execution gap.

I sometimes wish that I could describe just eight things for organizations to change that would close the gap between strategy and execution. What I have decided is that there is another way to look at the strategy to execution gap. It is based on the fact that no organization has enough resources to achieve all their targeted outcomes. Just addressing eight things isn’t always enough. This is a great list and well worthwhile tracking. I’d like to suggest creating a tighter link between specific targeted business outcomes and execution success. What that means is that you have to understand what your targeted outcomes are, the relative importance between them and then apply your resources towards achieving them. Together these begin to create a strategy to execution roadmap. You can then identify those areas of execution risk that need to be managed. This is where you can apply resources to increase the certainty of success.

If you had all the resources you needed to close the strategy to execution gap, you would be moving along a path towards CERTAINTY of success. I believe that no organization will ever have enough resources to achieve certainty. What you have to look for is that point along the path that gives you a sufficient level of certainty for the resources you can afford to commit. To build cross organizational commitment to the success, you can create a visual model of what initiatives you are funding, the resource that are committed that take you along that path. You increase buy-in if you can make these targeted cross organizational outcomes and initiatives visible to all the participants.

If you choose to call your execution starting point “HOPE”, then you have the start of a strategy to execution roadmap. A good model for this is to think of moving your organization along a line from Hope of success to Certainty.

I use the word Hope, because it adequately describes most organization’s execution method. What I mean is that few people own all the resources necessary to achieve any important targeted outcome. You have to rely on other parts of the organization to provide resources to achieve success. Current management processes don’t provide you with sufficient control over all resources needed to achieve key outcomes. You have to Hope that other parts of the organization will meet their commitments to provide committed resources.

Even after resources are committed, you don’t have adequate insight into other parts of the organization’s conflicting demands and priorities. You don’t often have sufficient warning to know when another part of the organization will fail to meet their commitments. As the survey shows, expectations aren’t met at least 49% of the time. (Most other surveys I’ve seen suggest well above 65% of strategic programs fail to meet CxO (CEO, CFO, COO etc.) expectations.

The solution is to find those outcomes and initiatives that will move the certainty of success for targeted outcomes sufficiently along the path towards certainty. For some critical business outcomes that will be very far along the path to certainty. In other cases, your organizational and gut-level experience will tell you that you have a good chance of success given past history. For those outcomes and initiatives, the addition of initiatives to ensure success can be lower.

The great part is that you can balance the need for higher levels of certainty for the most important outcomes against a lower level for less important outcomes. This way you can apply your resources to the most critical outcomes. You can go a long way in building commitment to success by creating this visual line of sight between initiatives that are designed increase success and the targeted outcomes that achieve business value.

Congratulations to George Ambler for finding this great survey and highlighting its value. It’s a must read.

Execution of Strategy Failure Statistics Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution) Relative Importance Resource Management The Language of Strategy to Execution

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.

Business Transformation Challenges execution Execution of Strategy execution process execution processes expectation Expectations failure Failure Statistics Getting Everyone on the Same Page Guiding Principles hierarchy Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution) language Measures of Success Organization Change organizational change organizational hierarchy performance performance improvement Qualities of Execution silo silos strategy success successful The Language of Strategy to Execution unpredictable change

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.