Strategy Execution

If strategy is deciding what to do, execution is all about making it happen. It’s the follow through. The main requirements for successful execution are:

(While this statement is meant to be provocative, it arose from first-hand conversations and observations.)
To improve your company's execution success, follow these 4 Disciplines:

• Discipline 1: Focus on the Wildly Important - The more you fill your plate, the less you will actually accomplish.
• Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures - If you take many actions, it is certain that only a few from the bunch are going to have a greater impact.
• Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard - In order to really get your employees engaged in what they are doing, get them to keep score.
• Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability - This discipline is where execution really takes place.

Good execution requires having a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it. ~ Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. ~Sir Winston Churchill

Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment. ~Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last

Strategy execution is the responsibility that makes or breaks executives.” ~Alan Branche and Sam Bodley-Scott, Implementation

Execution is a specific set of behaviors and techniques that companies need to master in order to have competitive advantage. It’s a discipline of its own. ~Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy, Execution

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. ~Peter Drucker

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. ~Jack Welch

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.~Michael Porter

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. ~Sun Tsu

Persistence is what makes the impossible possible, the possible likely, and the likely definite.~Robert Half

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. ~Peter Drucker

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. ~Albert Einstein

In life, as in football, you won’t go far unless you know where the goalposts are. ~Arnold H. Glasgow

Like a human being, a company has to have an internal communication mechanism, a ‘nervous system’, to coordinate its actions. ~Bill Gates

Strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions. ~Henry Mintzberg

Strategy is thinking about a choice and choosing to stick with your thinking. ~Jeroen De Flander

Sound strategy starts with having the right goal. ~Michael Porter

What do you want to achieve or avoid? The answers to this question are objectives. How will you go about achieving your desired results? The answer to this you can call strategy. ~ William E. Rothschild

In McKinsey's world, all of life is one of two things: strategy or organization. ~Tom Peters

The company without a strategy is willing to try anything. ~ Michael Porter

The most pressing problem with many corporate cultures, however, is that they fail to foster the coordination that, as we’ve discussed, is essential to execution. Companies consistently get this wrong.

When it comes to hires, promotions, and non-financial recognition, past performance is two or three times more likely than a track record of collaboration to be rewarded. Performance is critical, of course, but if it comes at the expense of coordination, it can undermine execution.

If the strategy is set up the top dogs, but then each silo and each middle manager is telling their people “No no, do this,” that leads to a ****** work culture. No one wants to come to work every day when they’re working on no-ROI deliverables.

Brief thought challenge for you: if you could make $120,000/year but came to work and did nothing of importance, would you?

What if the other option was $80,000/year where you felt really good about your accomplishments?

A lot of people would take the latter.

When we fail to align strategy with day-to-day work, we create a bad work culture.

If you want to make progress on culture, stop creating a false premise that strategy and culture are in competition with one another.

Refuse to engage in the strategy versus culture debate.

It’s not strategy or culture, but strategy and culture.

Clearly culture should be a core element of strategy, and while it’s important to understand that the vision for culture might be set by the tone at the top, the best cultures are not mandated or imposed on people, they are co-created by the people – people are the culture. But for the people there are no products, services, systems, processes, platforms, etc.