While the focus of most courses is to advance students’ understanding of strategy formulation, this core course will deepen students’ knowledge about the even more difficult process of strategy implementation (or execution).
Lectures, cases and all readings: EVERYTHING IS included.
SESSION 1
Strategy why are some firms more successful than others?
STRATEGY EXECUTION FRAMEWORK AND IDEATION
Why is execution important? Very often we talk about formulation, which is very difficult, but
execution is another level of difficulty. Many corporate failures here
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results” – W. Churchill
Formulating strategy is difficult. Making strategy work – executing or implementing it throughout
the organization – is even more difficult.
Without effective implementation, no business strategy can succeed. Unfortunately, most managers
know far more about developing strategy than they do about executing it
How to lower the failure rates in this? More than half of the companies are either not good at
execution or not even familiar with the concept
Execution is one of the biggest challenges for CEO and companies in general
Top 10 regional challenges table:
Why does strategy execution fail?
, • Often there is a disconnect between higher and lower management levels
• Responsibilities people do not know what they are responsible for
• Communication failures lower levels are not involved many times
• Feedback is very important in execution, and many times it is missing there are some
things that you cannot really plan
• Resources allocation strategic idea may be bright, but resources are not allocated
effectively and correctly
There exist four key factors for execution:
• Information information needs to flow within and to any level of the company. How do
top managerial levels communicate to lower levels? What do they say? Is it clear? Is the
information given sufficient?
1. Make sure important information about the competitive environment flows quickly
to corporate headquarters
2. Facilitate information flow across organizational boundaries
3. Help field and line employees understand how their day-to-day choices affect your
company’s bottom line
• Decision rights In banks, decision rights are really structured. In many other companies,
they are not. What are people at any level allowed to decide? This is the core point. Many
people just do not implement anything because they are afraid they have no decision right to
do it
1. Specify who owns each decision right and who must provide input
2. Ensure that everyone in your company knows which decisions and actions they’re
responsible for
3. Encourage higher-level managers to delegate operational decisions
• Motivators
, • Structures
Reading 3 tells us which are the main elements of a company implementing strategy execution
correctly see image with top 15 elements
The following are the top five elements:
• Everyone has a good idea of the decisions and actions for which he or she is responsible
in well organized entities, this statement is widely shared. In poorly organized ones,
generally there is no time to think of role definitions
, • Important information about the competitive environment gets to the headquarters
quickly
• Once made, decisions are rarely second-guessed
• Information flows freely across organizational boundaries horizontal and vertical
information flow
• Field and line employees usually have the information they need to understand the
bottom-line impact of their day-to-day choices
Implement the four building blocks to create more effective organizations
What can you do as a manager to implement those building blocks?
Operational excellence CEOs seek better alignment between strategy, objectives and
organizational capabilities
Sometimes firms have capabilities, but their strategy does not allow to implement those capabilities
correctly, it just does not match them
So, how about strategy execution? What is it?
• Do the right projects which projects really need the strategic support?
• Do the projects right how to execute the chosen projects well?
• Continually review and re-align 1 and 2 it might be the case that over time the projects
you chose are not really important anymore. Re-think and re-align
Strategy execution framework answers to these 6 questions:
• Who are you? IDEATION
• What is the context? NATURE
• Where are you going? VISION
• What needs creating? ENGAGEMENT
• How will be built it? SYNTHESIS
• How will you operate? TRANSITION
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