Last night I was teaching strategy execution on the MBA capstone unit. I asked the participants: ‘in your experience, how well did the companies they know rate on strategy execution on a scale of 1-10' Only one rated some of the companies he’d worked with above 5. He gave them a 6-7: ironic really that this defined the benchmark for ‘pretty good’. And worse, 24 others rated their experience as ‘less than 5’.
When I asked this same group why this was so, out poured all the usual issues: lack of strategy; lack of alignment; confusion; poor communication; lack of resources; poor planning; lack of metrics, and so forth. This was a diverse group, mostly from middle management.
This is truly tragic. Why? Because it doesn’t have to be: shouldn’t be. There is nothing we don’t know about what is required to execute well. So we need to think more deeply about these issues: why are we really so poor at execution; and what can we do about it?
If you want to know the answer to these questions, come along to a half-day workshop (14 October): A winning edge through strategy execution. You can find the workshop details here … Creating a winning edge through strategy execution. There are still a few places left.
You might also like to check out some of my recent blogs (eg. What's your plan to overcome the strategy-2-execution deficit? ).
