The Language of Strategy 2 Execution

Bringing Together Financial Measures, Strategy and Execution, Enterprise Architecture and Change Efforts: Targeted Outcomes to the Rescue!0
ronald.lamb posted in Uncategorized, Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Performance Improvement, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Measures of Success, Strategy on January 24th, 2010

Lack of Coordinated Effort at the Enterprise Level

I’ve rarely been in a meeting where the following leaders have met to bring about a coordinated effort to synchronize their key performance or financial and operational measures: VP of Finance, Strategy (Enterprise and Business Unit), Operations and Enterprise Architecture. Their perspectives, responsibilities and ability to affect positive change are indispensible but rarely coordinated. It is time to explore the opportunity and the challenges to overcome.

My experience working or consulting to executives within multi-billion revenue organizations is that their enterprise and business unit strategies are so broad and complex that very few people grasp the whole, and few could explain how they integrate. Yet, these organizations explain to Wall Street in terms of revenues and profitability how all these operations work together.

Few people operate at the enterprise level, so this coordinated enterprise story of coordination between finance strategy, execution is usually pretty weak. Often the story is basically a financial one or the power points of various business unit executives pulled together.

Most people work in business units and have their own part of the total strategy to execute. They have to optimize their operations to reach their own financial and other measured goals, regardless of the level of clarity of the enterprise strategy. A common refrain from the top executives on downwards, is “I know what our part of the organization is working on, but I have only a remote understanding of what other groups are doing and how their efforts impact ours.” Add to that, is the fact that most financial measures for organizations are not well aligned to the operational efforts.

What You End Up With Is A Major Gap In Understanding of What Has To Change Operationally To Move The Dial On Enterprise Financial Measures

How then can a large organization create this connection between corporate financial measures and business unit operations?

Creating a Common Language for Strategy to Execution: Targeted Outcomes (Financial, Strategic, Operational, Behavioral etc.)

The one approach that has consistently worked is the decomposition of Targeted Outcomes. These targeted outcomes start as targeted financial outcomes at the highest strategic level. For example, Earnings per Share can be decomposed into the profitability targets for the major strategic focus areas of the business. These in turn can be decomposed into the targeted revenue and cost savings targets within the business units. It is at this stage that you can decompose financial outcomes into all the operational targeted outcomes that are necessary to achieve the financial measures.

Once you have the set of targeted operational outcomes identified, you can add measures to them. That is exactly the type of information that VP’s and Directors need within Business Units to identify the operational efforts, programs and projects that can achieve those higher level operational outcomes.

Once the operational outcomes and associated projects are identified, it becomes just a matter of standard enterprise architecture and project management practice to identify and communicate the areas of change and then the dependency between change projects anywhere within the organization.

This is by design a short point of view based on observation and bringing about successful change. The major take away is that bringing Financial Measures, Strategy and Execution together using Targeted Outcomes Decomposition and Enterprise Architecture can be done. The problem is more often, that these groups and their efforts are still carried out within silo’s.

No Common Governing or Meeting Platform to Bring Together the Right People for the Right Actions

It is the influential executive or bold director/ manager who can bring the right level of awareness to the problem and potential solution. It is tougher still to get the right people in the room to even agree to an enterprise solution.

I’ll be writing more about the promise and value of bring these together and with some suggestions on how to bring it about in the real world of competing agendas, and not enough time.

Challenges to Overcome in Coordinating Finance to Strategy to Execution Efforts at the Enterprise Level

Here are some of the challenges that need to be explored in building coordination in Finance, Strategy, Execution and Enterprise Architecture;

• How to inform each other of the opportunities that we each know exist if we coordinated efforts.
• How to overcome the silo’d way those groups operate.
• What to do, when there is no standing forum for these leaders to come together.
• How to set up a charter for this group, and the measures of success that they can newly influence, and
• How to measure and sustain success.

Challenges execution Execution of Strategy Expectations Getting Everyone on the Same Page Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution) Measures of Success performance improvement silo silos strategy succcessful

Better Execution: Change Your Strategy? [Part 1]0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Performance Improvement, Organization Change, Expectations, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Life Lessons & Execution, Strategy on September 20th, 2006

Rob May of BusinessPundit.com, poses a really interesting question in a Blog posting.

““Does Change Help Link Strategy and Execution?”

He’s curious about how companies can improve the link between the two. The key question he poses is:
By consistently changing your strategy, do employees become more focused on the execution of it? Do changes in strategy lead to better execution?
I’m going to give my response to his interesting question in three parts.

Part 1:

• Too frequent change in strategy hurts execution success.

Part 2:

• Employees don’t become complacent about execution due to infrequent change in strategy.
• You can’t master a strategy.

Part 3:

• A famous Harvard University study, known as the Hawthorne Effect, may actually suggest that you can get better execution if you change strategy often.

Part 1

“By consistently changing your strategy, do employees become more focused on the execution of it? Do changes in strategy lead to better execution?”

This is a great question. It may seem like the answer is straight forward, but there is an interesting wrinkle based on a famous, Harvard University study. I’ll return to this study after reviewing the obvious response. I think most people would immediately answer that changing the strategy frequently will lead to poor execution. Here’s are some reasons why:

1. Uses up key Resources: Creating a coherent strategy is management intensive work. It eats up leadership time and focus. Refinement of a strategy is fine since it supports existing momentum. Changing strategy requires serious analysis, building of the end state and all the efforts necessary to gain agreement, communicate it, and build the plans to achieve it. Execution suffers due to management focus on the strategy rather than execution.
2. Wait and See: Critical work and decisions get delayed during strategy formulation work, as employees “wait and see which way the strategy goes”. “There is no reason to start some critical initiatives if they are associated with the new strategy, is there?” Execution gets delayed.
3. More Project Start-up Time: In many organizations a large majority is project oriented and doesn’t know what the strategy is. What they want is a good definition of the project they’re supposed to accomplish. Changing strategy means changing requirements. Execution suffers as projects associated with the former strategy have to get turned off and project resources released. New projects take time to get started as resources become available. Value isn’t achieved until the project team is providing deliverables that combine with other projects to create value. Execution suffers.
4. Feeling that You’re Delivering Value is Destroyed: Teams like to accomplish their project scope, on-time, on-budget. It’s what they get rewarded for. Changing people’s projects regularly doesn’t let them accomplish much. It is hard to be proud of being part of continuously partially completed projects. Execution suffers as team member’s sense of the value of accomplishment is destroyed.
5. This Too Shall Pass: When strategy changes frequently, it is tough to measure people and the value they are delivering. They start to understand that they’re not measurable. They realize that management has no ‘stick-to-it-ness’. People nod at all the right places when asked to change, but then do nothing. No one will check and they believe any change won’t be sustained anyway. It will go back to business as usual. “This too will pass” becomes the reaction to requests to change.

Part 2 Continues tomorrow.

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7 Steps to Eliminate Your Organizations’ Sacred Cows0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Business Transformation, Challenges, Organization Change, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), The Language of Strategy to Execution on September 12th, 2006

The University of Michigan, surveyed 308 executives during 2005 on the variables that were most likely to derail their strategy. The variable chosen most frequently, by 38% of the respondents was, was “their Company’s Past / Habits”. That seems to suggest either an unwillingness or lack of a capability to address these habits. In many organizations these are also called the sacred cows or “the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about’’.

Jim Collins has it right in his best seller “Good to Great”. One of the most important habits for a great company is to “Face the Brutal Facts”. One set of facts that few mature organizations face is the entrenched habits that hold them back from high achievement.

It is absolutely possible to change deeply entrenched organizational habits. I worked with a business unit of a large firm that needed to address this issue head-on. They were given five years to achieve a production target well above their historic ability, or risk being sold. They desperately needed to depart from their past, from the habits that had held them back.
They were going to need everyone’s maximum effort to achieve the target. That meant ensuring that everyone was on the same page, committed to the same objectives. We decided to identify to the whole management team what we believed were the problem habits and how they were directly linked to achieving the targeted outcomes. We then showed the actions we wanted people in the organization to take. In many cases this meant changes to deeply rooted leadership practices. The top leadership team had to lead by example. The process gave license to all of the team to ‘correct’ their peers when they were using behaviors that propped up the old habits.

They also embraced a reporting mechanism that would provide the full organization with visibility on progress. It showed that the leadership was serious about change.

The result was a great success. It was especially rewarding to hear the team formally declare when any of the ‘bad’ habits was sufficiently eliminated. It was then removed as a risk to success on the execution roadmap.

The method can work for any sized organization. To achieve the same result here are seven steps to follow;

1. Identify the habits you’d like to change (free flowing interviews using a trusted third-party works best),
2. Identify the root cause of the habits (to ensure you don’t just end up hiding the symptoms),
3. Put in place outcomes and associated initiatives to remove the cause of those habits.
4. Structure a logical diagram to communicate the links between the main program’s targeted outcomes, the habits you want to remove and the root causes.
5. Put in place a way to track change efforts on the root causes. A modified cause/effect diagram also known as a fishbone diagram works well.
6. Start by coloring the text for all the identified ‘bad’ habits and route-causes in red. When you start working on improving any of them, change the appropriate text colors to orange. When you agree that the cause / or symptom is sufficiently removed, color the text in green. It should also allow you to identify reduction in the visible symptoms that the organization has for so long associated with those habits.
7. This should provide a real sense of accomplishment. Celebrate successes. You should notice fewer grumblings about ‘we’ll never be able to get it done’. It shows the organization;
   • you understand what the barriers are,
   • that they are true impediments to success,
   • that actions are in place and
   • you recognize when there is real improvement.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like further information by using the comment link on this posting.

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Did You Just Volunteer for Some Work?0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Resource Management, Relative Importance, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Life Lessons & Execution, Strategy on September 7th, 2006

We don’t generally think of corporations and government organizations as volunteer organizations, but stop and think about it. How much of where you allocate your own time is influenced by what you choose to do. Probably more than you’d like to admit. We seek to get on projects that interest us. In that way we are volunteering our time.
As a leader, you’re much more likely to get people to voluntarily contribute their time, skills and money if they can sign up to help achieve a targeted outcome rather than sign up to execute a project.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to speak to, and in some cases work with, the leaders of organizations that rely on volunteers to achieve their strategic goals. They’ve ranged in size from a single leader and advisory board for a professional services community (PSVillage), to a large open source application development group (Wordpress), to the Department of Energy and a number of America’s largest energy firms. In each case we talked about what their goals were and how they were going about achieving them. In most cases they identified a series of projects that they wanted to get done. They also all had limited resources for the size of their targeted objectives. None of them had any way to ensure long-term commitment from participants. It would be huge value to them to be able to increase the level of volunteerism and sustained commitment to the targeted objectives.

Volunteers start with high energy and high estimates of the time and resources they commit to. Lack of progress, frustration and lack of control over their ability to achieve success cause their commitment to wither. As a result execution success is unpredictable. Leaders have to be ever optimistic and to some degree charismatic to continue to attract and retain volunteers. On the other hand, they also have to be realistic and level-headed to continuously deal with the logistics and disappointment of incomplete or missed commitments and execution failure.

What none of them had figured out was how to effectively connect willing contributors with what needs to be done. They had no effective way to connect resources to work, other than through identified projects. This isn’t very different than what occurs in any organization. The only difference is that in traditional organizations, managers direct their people to work. They too had been directed by higher-level managers and their performance objectives. The larger the organization, the more layers are involved. In volunteer or membership based organizations, the link between work and resources is mostly one to one. Each volunteer can decide for themselves where they’d like to participate.

The approaches taken by the organizations I spoke to were each project based. The leaders had defined the projects they felt were necessary. They identified them to their pool of potential volunteers in the hope that they would be taken up by a volunteer or member. I was able to work with the Department of Energy and the energy firms to shift their thinking first to outcomes and only then to projects. They were able to create a roadmap that all understood. There was a renewed commitment to a high-level targeted outcome. They developed a logical process for aligning volunteer activity to the most important interim outcomes. For the others, they will get great value if they can start to identify targeted outcomes and their linkage to higher level targeted outcomes.
This will provide volunteers and their organization with the ability to:

• Understand which are the most important outcomes.
• Choose or influence their participation in the outcomes that they are most attracted to and can achieve.
• Understand how that contribution supports the highest level outcome of the organization.
• Understand wider context through being aware of the surrounding targeted outcomes, and so cooperate on their achievement.
• Use their own skills to design the project / actions necessary to achieve a targeted outcome.
• Provide an opportunity for greater emotional investment and sense of achievement in reaching a targeted outcome.
• Provide sustained commitment, to achieve various projects necessary to achieve a targeted outcome.

For volunteer organizations, corporations, and governments you can increase the success level of execution by getting greater commitment to the most important outcomes and attract sustained participation. These are invaluable in all of these ‘volunteer’ organizations, just like the one you’re in.

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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.

Abidjan Cote dIvoire Country Experiences curling execution Execution of Strategy French language Ivory Coast Life Lessons & Execution most embarassing Raytheon strategy

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.

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