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A Japanese proverb. “dVa yi sdi or ena wmi.t hAocut itoanc twi oi tnh iosuat vs tirsai ot engiys ias na i cgohltlme cat ri oen. ” oI ff gerxeeact ut theodu, gi th’ st sj ut shtaht oa tr ea inr .e Ov enr w i t i s h t h m e o f i u l n i t p d a l s e d i s d i s r e e f , c l h a t e i i o l a i n n d l g o o , r n o p g r u a w r c p o t o i r o s s n e e , a kind of counter strategy.
W hether your company’s successful and growing, not so successful and struggling, or you’ve just been treading water a while, it may be time to take a look at the market, your strategic approach and consider a change in course. When revising strategy, and given the changes necessary to implement something new, there are a lot of elements to consider: the flexibility and agility of the company culture, the competition, the essential value proposition, new markets and possibilities, fixed limitations, and the ever-present capability constraints. Crafting a strategy is hard and crafting an executable strategy is harder yet. It’s hard because there are multiple issues to consider, each of which may be complex and resistant to resolution. In fact, strategy formulation has often been called a wicked, messy problem. And it’s harder yet because of the often-tenuous connection between actions and outcomes. The reasons may be varied, but authors David Norton and Robert Kaplan writing in the now classic The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action, estimate that 90 percent of organizations do not execute their strategies successfully. McKinsey research is only a bit less pessimistic saying that strategic transformation efforts miss the mark “about 70 percent of the time.” There are a host of factors that contribute to this breakdown, but most research suggests that an inability to formulate and communicate an effective plan combined with an organization’s innate resistance to change lead to a shortfall in plan execution. It’s difficult to fully understand all the issues a firm may face – all the constraints within which it operates, the capabilities it has — or doesn’t — and the idiosyncratic culture that shapes it. A wicked, messy problem. If you can get the planners and implementers around the table and blur the distinction between strategy and execution; if you’re willing to be persistent, to iterate, test and reiterate, you can get there. If the success rates estimates are even vaguely close to the mark, the bar’s
pretty low. And it may be like a batting average. You’re doing great if you’re hitting 300 and only whiffing 70 percent of the time. A business’s strategy will most likely be conceived and articulated (theoretically) as a response to the broad market environment within the parameters of the firm’s resources and capabilities. A strategic plan should outline the approach by which the company creates and/or captures value and indicate how it will continue to create and capture value over time — how it’s been successful, how it intends to preserve that success in the short term, and what it needs to do to extend that success in the long term. Strategy usually flows from the top of the company. It’s the domain of the C-suite, often aided by a team of external consultants. These experts then delegate the execution to the employees. Like a body — a corpus if you will — the brain (management) thinks and chooses, and the hand (the rank and file) does what the brain tells it to do. From that perspective, strategy is thinking, execution is doing. However, that one-way flow creates what has been called “choice-less doers.” It disenfranchises, disengages the people in the organization that make the strategy a reality. If you’re wondering why your employees are indifferent to your grand plans, it’s because they had no part in crafting them and don’t understand the rationale behind them. You didn’t ask them to think. You ask only that they do what you’ve told them to do because you told them. Of course, organizations, particularly large organizations, are resistant to change. Some of that resistance is simple physics. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. It takes the application of force to change motion and direction. However, the application of force works for inanimate objects. Less so with people. You might be tempted to force change upon your company, but you won’t be particularly effective. Which brings us to culture. If you’re tuning an existing strategic plan, making minor changes to keep it current and effective, chances are you
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