WHAT IS STRATEGY WITHOUT EXECUTION?
Many companies develop a suitable strategy for many different areas within the business, for example Sales and Marketing.
These meetings often take place behind closed doors with only the most senior managers and board members invited to participate and offer suggestions.
Strategy is often a statement of intent designed to demonstrate professionalism, direction and understanding to stakeholders within the business, however, quite often decisions are made without the consultation of other key leaders within the business.
This creates an issue as to the dissemination of the message to the wider community within the business and buy in from key managers and staff.
As you can start to see strategy is important to business but strategy without the involvement of key leaders and managers is difficult to make credible.
This leads to the next issue, a strategy without the involvement of a key stakeholders in the business becomes very difficult to execute.
A plan created with the involvement of representatives from across the business is surely a plan with a much greater chance of success and execution
This is of course a very brief insight into this subject but a valid conversational topic in the world of commercial management and leadership
Matthew Clayton AIBC
Ambassador - The Institute of Business Consulting and Chartered Management Institute
24th May 2010
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Comments
Hi Matthew,
Totally agree that strategy is absolutely vital to the ongoing success of any business or enterprise.
As an Accredited EFQM Business Excellence Model Practitioner & Assessor (www.efqm.org/en for those unfamiliar with the model) and having assessed businesses and organisations using this world renowned model, it never ceases to amaze me just how often poor execution and lack of any assessment & review limits the impact of an excellent strategy.
Using the EFQM model allows businesses to identify weaknesses such as lack of understanding of the objectives by the operational staff too and gives you the opportunity to take remedial action a bit like Demming's PDCA cycle.
Simple models with very effective results if used properly.
Tricky one though isn't it? I mean the top managers are paid a whole lot of money for doing this kind of thing. If they're now devolving the decision making to those lower down it kinda begs the question what they exist for doesn't it?
I agree that the connection between senior leadership (those who outline strategy) and middle managers is vital for successful transformation of objectives into operations. Bottom-top input during strategy definition phase will secure much needed buy-in later.
Unfortunately, quite often, I witnessed closed executive sessions followed only by top-down communication of outcomes. Even more often I found pritty well defined strategies which were lacking execution control tools for follow up and tactical steering.
We mustn't forget that front line personnel actually execute all our strategies and come in touch with business environment hands on. Their timeous input can save a lot of trouble and money.