The Language of Strategy 2 Execution

Better Execution: Stick to Your Strategy? [Part 2]1
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Performance Improvement, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Guiding Principles, Life Lessons & Execution, Strategy, The Language of Strategy to Execution on September 21st, 2006

Part 2
Yesterday I started with Part 1 of a response to a posting by Rob May of BusinessPundit.com.

“Does Change Help Link Strategy and Execution?”

He’s curious about how companies can improve the link between the two.

Today I’m going to respond to Rob’s second question:

“[Do] companies that stick with a similar strategy for too long wind up with employees that are complacent about execution? Perhaps they have executed the same strategy for so many years they have mastered it.”

Here are my observations about firms that have a strategy that hasn’t been changed in a long time.

1. We don’t have a strategy: Companies that don’t refresh their strategy for long periods have employees who typically say that they don’t have a strategy. Things change that affect any strategy. Strategies are based on internal goals, external opportunities and constraints. A change to any of these requires an adjustment or re-confirmation of the legitimacy of the strategy. What more often occurs is that change occurs and the famous strategy binder that originally was seen as the holy-grail for the firm is hence forth seen as obsolete.
2. We go off-site once a year to develop our strategy: How wonderful it would be if we could organize all the internal and external changes that have a major impact on our firm to occur just before our annual off-site strategy exercise. We could deal with all of them at once at set our strategic course for the next year. We could then revise our strategy at some nice location each year about the same time.
   “Wait a minute now, that’s what we do now! But we haven’t sorted out how to ensure the only significant change happens before our strategy session.” Employees don’t become complacent with a stale strategy, they ignore it as irrelevant based on accumulated change since it was created and communicated.
3. You can’t master a strategy: As explained above, there is no such thing as “mastery of a strategy”. You can’t go on auto-pilot thinking that you’ve mastered your strategy. Think of how disruptive e-commerce was to the retail industry or personal financial services. Companies like Sears and Merrill Lynch who might have seemed to have ‘mastered’ their strategy had some very hard lessons to learn from Amazon and e-Trade.
4. Complacency comes from believing in your own hype: Yes employees can become complacent in execution. As Jim Collins suggests, it comes from a failure to face the brutal facts. Some organizations breed and work on sustaining an incredible story about their capabilities and success. They loose any real ability to tell when they’re dead wrong. When the imagined reality varies from the real situation, it seems to be the time to hold on to the myth even harder than before. Believing in the myth of being successful in execution allows you to ignore change around you. It allows you to avoid figuring out what you need to change to remain successful.
   
   The worst case of it I ever experienced was with DEC (Digital Equipment Corp). They were the most famous mini-computer vendor in the 1970’s and 80’s. In the early 1990’s as head of sales for a division of Westinghouse, I brought them in as a partner during a negotiation for a $100 million outsourcing deal. We were selected and were going through contract negotiation and a detailed examination of the deal. The client had a number of concerns that they wanted addressed by very senior DEC executives with DEC’s commitments put into the contract. The DEC executives were so insulted by the questioning of their capabilities, that they treated the client and their questions with unhidden contempt. To my shock, one senior DEC even resorted to calling one of the clients a @#@$&! idiot to their face for asking some questions about their ability to deliver their services. Needless to say the client ultimately broke off negotiations. The DEC executive point of view was that the clients were idiots for not taking the deal. Their own hype about their capabilities was much more real and important to them than examining the client’s sense of risk. Needless to say my experience wasn’t unique. DEC ended up breaking up their organization into parts and selling it off bit by bit until it was gone.

• What is success, if you continuously change your strategy?
• What is successful execution when you don’t get to complete projects and achieve targeted outcomes?
• What is success when you don’t update your strategy?

My short definition of execution is: Leveraging the assets that you have available, to achieve targeted outcomes.
Successful execution is: meeting expectations in the execution of targeted outcomes. In order to execute a strategy you translate it into targeted outcomes.

Summary of Suggested Rules:

1. A strategy that changes too often puts initiatives and execution in disarray.
2. A strategy that changes too infrequently becomes irrelevant. The targeted outcomes and their associated initiatives are relevant by chance rather than by design.
3. Few organizations can change their strategy at the speed of change. Most strategies reside in binders and PowerPoint presentations. They are not easily altered, and rarely read.
4. Organizations can translate their strategy into targeted outcomes. It allows the organization to modify these targeted outcomes and their associated initiatives at the speed of change. Execution stays relevant.
5. Strategy as translated into targeted outcomes can exist at any level of an organization. Targeted outcomes are the object of successful execution. The above rules apply to execution at any level of an organization.
Challenges Execution of Strategy Guiding Principles Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution) Life Lessons & Execution performance improvement strategy The Language of Strategy to Execution

Business Context Changes Faster Than You Can Execute Anything Important.0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Performance Improvement, Resource Management, Relative Importance, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Expectations, Qualities of Execution, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Guiding Principles, Strategy, The Language of Strategy to Execution on August 1st, 2006

One of the primary guidelines I share with clients is;

Business context changes faster than you can execute anything important.

How relevant is that?

I just had a long term colleague depart from a senior corporate position. I asked him if he saw any warning signs. Apart from the reorganization that was the triggering factor, he saw a recurring theme.

The CEO would set out a new initiative for his department. They would work on it, and as they were nearing completion provide some initial feedback to the CEO. The CEO would let him know that it was no longer that important, and set out a new task. After enough of these episodes, he lost a sense of accomplishment and contribution.

This scenario is not unique to my colleague. Many organizations have similar issues.

Here are five lessons to be learned by any organization for dealing with the speed of change.

1. You can’t successfully operate a business with executives focused on initiatives. They need to be focused on targeted outcomes, which is a translation of how the strategy can be achieved. A strategy doesn’t change nearly as often as initiatives.

   With a defined, narrow, set of high-level targeted outcomes, it is possible to define the additional necessary interim outcomes. An executive can then determine the initiatives necessary to achieve that outcome. As conditions inevitably change, the executive can shift to more appropriate initiatives. This makes better use of key resources.

2. Use a shared method to communicate the agreed upon relative importance of the top-level targeted outcomes. No organization has enough resources to achieve all the outcomes necessary to carry out a strategy. There must be agreement on the starting point for the relative importance of outcomes. This is what in turn points you towards the initial set of approved initiatives. The problem is that business context changes faster than you can execute anything important. Midstream you’ll to have to shift resources to the initiatives that support the now more important outcomes.
3. Changed business context forces a change in execution behavior. For example, after some business change, you might be required to achieve the original targeted outcome:
1. With an even higher level of performance
2. sooner,
3. at a lower cost, or with reduced management attention,
4. with greater certainty of success,
5. with a wider reach to increase the area of impact
6. with greater buy-in,
7. with increased sustainability or
8. with greater measurability and transparency of progress.

I call these “Qualities of Execution”. Any change between behaviors you used when you started execution to one of the new Qualities of Execution™ requires potential shifts. These shifts can be in many areas e.g. behavior, process, technologies, partnerships etc.

4. Keep everyone on the same page. People learn about change at different times, in different ways. Their managers interpret the impact of change for their team members, and they interpret what their manager has told them. The organization must have a method to identify and communicate how a changed business context impacts the high-level outcomes and Qualities of Execution. Otherwise targeted outcomes will not be achieved. That’s what seems to have happened with my colleague. Failure statistics for strategic programs are well over 50%.
5. Manage down conflicting execution behaviors. Based on continuous interpretations of new business context, managers and team members change their expectations on how execution will occur and what the final results should be. Hopefully this means team members will change their execution behaviors. We all have met those people who don’t or won’t change their behavior regardless of the situation. They’re not reading this anyway and will randomly disrupt execution when their behavior is at odds with the desired Qualities of Execution.
   

   You must keep everyone on the same page as per the point above. You can then identify the desired Qualities of Execution for everyone at the same time, in the same way. You now stand a chance of having complementary behaviors and increase the chance of successful execution.

   Seeing conflicting behaviors is more often the case. You can imagine team members or a sponsor working differently to achieve an outcome;

   • as fast as possible, and another
   • at as low cost as possible, and another
   • with as much buy-in as possible.

These conflicting behaviors lead to dysfunctional inter-actions and increase the likelihood of failed execution.

Here are six steps you can follow to deal with the speed of change.

1. Start with everyone on the same page. Create an Outcomes Roadmap. Translate strategy into targeted and interim outcomes. They’re more executable than a thick strategy binder or PowerPoint presentation.
2. Assign outcome coordinators to ensure accountability. Outcomes use resources from all over the organization. One person needs to coordinate achievement of each outcome on behalf of the whole organization.
3. Focus on the most important things. Identify the relative importance of outcomes and the initiatives that support them. Attach resources to the most important outcomes. Manage how importance changes over time and shift resources as needed.
4. Keep everyone on the same page. Use multiple types of media to communicate the updated Outcomes Roadmap. Use gaps in achievement of targeted outcomes rather than initiatives as the focus of status reports and meetings.
5. Manage changing expectations and desired behaviors for success. Change occurs and is communicated through the Outcomes Roadmap. Use it to identify the Qualities of Execution that drive desired behaviors for execution success. Talk about the desired execution behaviors in your teams as they are required to change.
6. Translate wins into normal operations. Deal with diminishing returns when nearing completion of an outcome. Be prepared to capture value and shift resources. Make management status meeting more effective by reduced reporting on historic important outcomes as outcomes of higher importance eclipse the old.

I’ve introduced these steps to many clients. They can be adopted by individuals for their own targeted outcomes, by project teams on a targeted outcome, or for an organization trying to manage multiple competing critical outcomes.

All of the above is required. The days of completing a project before the business context changes are long gone.

Challenges Execution of Strategy Expectations Getting Everyone on the Same Page Guiding Principles Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution) performance improvement Qualities of Execution Relative Importance Resource Management strategy 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

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.

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.

Challenges Guiding Principles Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution) Organization Change