The Language of Strategy 2 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

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.