Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
of
Business Execution
Yanky Fachler
Contents
Introduction
1. Execution: The Discipline of getting things done by Larry
Bossidy and Ram Charan
2. Execution Plain and Simple: 12 Steps to Achieving Any Goal
on Time and on Budget by Robert Neiman
3. Results Rule: Build a Culture That Blows the Competition
Away by Randy Pennington
4. Making It All Work: Winning at the game of work and the
business of life by David Allen
5. Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and
Change by Lawrence G. Hrebiniak
6. Executing Your Strategy: How to Break It Down and Get It
Done by MStrategy Execution Heroes: Business Strategy
Implementation and Strategic Management Demystified by
8. Beyond Strategy: The Leader's Role in Successful
Implementation by Robin Speculand
9. The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for
Competitive Advantage by Robert Kaplan and David Norton
10. Executing strategy Harvard Business Press Pocket Mentor
11. Closing the Execution Gap: How Great Leaders and Their
Companies Get Results by Richard Lepsinger
12. Get it Done! A blueprint for business execution by Ralph
Welborn and Vince Kasten
The 33 Strategies of Execution
INTRODUCTION
Strategy or execution - which is more important?
This is a bit of a chicken vs. egg argument, but there is emerging
agreement that while strategy explains 15% of a companys
performance, the execution of the strategy explains 85%.
In the business literature (both offline and online), the amount of
content available is massively skewed towards strategy.
Execution as an integral part of the business process continues to
receive too little attention.
Traditionally, the world has been divided into two groups of
people, positioned on opposite sides of a chasm: those who can
think strategically and come up with new concepts, and those
who can implement others' ideas. Undoubtedly, we need both
types of people, and without the other, neither group would be of
much value to a results-oriented organization.
However, managers often cannot get these two groups to work
together effectively.
We've all seen the charismatic CEO who is a great communicator,
a visionary, a leader in all respects, but who has an organization
rife with operating problems, miscommunication, and an inability
to respond to competitive pressures.
And weve all seen people who can focus on the tasks at hand but
have trouble seeing the big picture. In an environment with
continually changing corporate messages and strategies,
productivity comes to a halt unless you have people with both
conceptual and practical qualities.
An over-emphasis on strategic planning is like sitting down and
drawing up plans for your dream house without consulting a
contractor. You may devise the most elaborate, modern,
attractive home, but what about reality? When you deliver your
plans to the contractor, you may find it is going to cost twice as
much and take three times as long as you thought, and that some
of your plans are not achievable.
Thats why you need to have both tacticians and strategists in
attendance at planning sessions. The presence of both will
anchor the outcome of such planning sessions in reality and will
improve the chances for success.
One of the problems with strategic planning is that it often
involves too much intellectualizing and philosophizing.
Companies can be so busy with their visions and plans for success
that they leave too little time to focus on implementation.
There are many reasons for this. Compared with strategy,
execution can appear downright unsexy. Execution is the ugly
duckling paddling alongside such regal swans as strategic
planning, total quality management, or e-anything.
Yet nothing is more basic and more crucial to success than
execution. The loftiest goals and the most creative strategies can
easily be undone by poor execution.
Many jobs are filled with the wrong people because the leaders
who promote them are comfortable with them. Its natural for
executives to develop a sense of loyalty to those theyve worked
with over time, particularly if theyve come to trust their
judgments. When the right people are not in the right jobs, the
problem is visible and transparent.
Leaders know intuitively that they have a problem and will often
readily acknowledge it. Some leaders drain energy from people.
Other leaders energise their people.
Why are the right people not in the right jobs?
Never finish a meeting without clarifying what the followthrough will be, who will do it, when and how they will do
it, what resources they will use, and how and when the
next review will take place and with whom.
Never launch an initiative unless youre personally
committed to it and prepared to see it through until its
embedded in the DNA of an organization.
12 steps of execution:
1. Take responsibility. Someone will need to be responsible
for each idea to be implemented. This means taking the
initiative to achieve specific objectives and tasks needed
to see the idea through to fruition.
2. The idea must be defined in writing, ideally in a
memorandum that specifies the outcome, individuals
involved, general timeframe, and the evaluation criteria
to periodically report the progress being made. This
becomes the assignment that is agreed upon before
starting the project.
3. Put together a good core team to help develop a solid
strategy that will become the basic approach used to
implement the plan of action that identifies the resources
needed, clarifies roles of the team members, and possible
risks and actions to avoid.
4. Take the summary and get input from key players so the
strategy can be refined. This will help get agreement from
those who have bought into the project, and it will
identify challenges before you start. With this insight
you'll be able to determine the feasibility of the project
and make adjustments early in the process before you've
committed a lot of time, energy, and money into it.
5. Take action and create momentum by holding a
compelling launch event. Starting off with an event gets
everyone's attention, signals that this project is special,
gets the team focused on the project, and lets the team
know that others are aware of it and will be watching.
11. Push to get the final results and recognize the effort made
by the team. You started off with a launch, now end the
project with another event where team members are
recognized, and possibly rewarded.
12. Capture the lessons learned and disseminate your
knowledge in a systematic manner so that others can
benefit. This can be accomplished by asking this basic
question in the assessment process: Did we fully
accomplish all that we set out to accomplish?
organizational structure
coordination
information sharing
incentives
controls
change management
culture
the role of power and influence in your business.
Issue #1: the need for sound planning and a clear, focused
strategy
Corporate-level planning
Business strategy
Low-cost producer
Differentiation strategies
Developing the right capabilities
Rules of change:
Reward cooperation
Clarify responsibility and accountability
Culture affects performance
Organizational performance affects culture
But nobody really knows what did the trick. Its impossible to say
what worked and what didnt. Even worse, companies change
things for the worse because they dont know the key elements
of their execution success.
Strategy execution is your highway to performance. To be more
precise, you should picture your strategy execution process not
as a single street but as a network of unique roads smaller and
larger ones all interlinked together. And the roads carry names
like strategy review process, initiative management process,
coaching process, individual objective setting process and so
on. And all of these processes, and the interaction between
them, are vital to your execution success.
Organisations need to overcome bottlenecks:
There is too much complexity.
Managers dont understand the process.
Clear ownership is lacking.
The process and improvement actions are not visible on
the executive radar.
Managers fear proposing, and making, changes.
The process isnt adapted to the needs of the
organisation.
The quality of the process isnt measured.
One part of the process gets all of the attention, and
others none.
Its too expensive.
This book helps you to:
Approach Strategy Execution from a managers
perspective.
Align individual/organisational performance in an easy
to communicate, sexy Strategy Execution framework.
Leaders are responsible not only for crafting strategy but also for
implementing it. Implementation of strategy can't simply be
delegated. Leaders know that a titanic mistake has been to focus
more on crafting strategy than implementing it.
The Implementation Compass: 8 global best practices of
implementation.
The Implementation Compass assesses your readiness to
implement your strategy, assists in crafting your Implementation
Plan, and identifies the actions you need to take today to deliver
tomorrow's strategy. The Implementation Compass guides
management through a very holistic approach that addresses all
the facets of the organization, all the processes and subprocesses and progressively transforms the very DNA of the
organization towards the desired state that the strategy
envisions.
12 Implementation Tips for Success
1. Dont underestimate the implementation challenge as it is
tougher than you anticipate.
2. Recognize that every implementation is unique and it has
to fit your organizations culture.
3. Break the mold of previous failures identify and take the
right actions.
4. Review on-going projects for alignment against the new
strategy objectives.
5. Recognize that it will mean more work.
6. Treat staff members as your Strategy Customers.
7. Focus on Mavericks support the people who support
you.
After this effort, staff members were able to both understand the
strategy and know exactly what to do to help implement it.
Strategy can't be implemented if it can't be understood, and it
can't be understood if it can't be broken down into action steps.
MIND SHIFT #5 - 'What worked yesterday will work
tomorrow.' No, new strategies are needed every two or three
years. Peter Drucker observed that "maintaining yesterday is
difficult and time consuming and therefore requires the
institution's scarcest and most valuable resources - and above all,
its ablest people - to non-results." Acting this way means your
people are not available to create a successful tomorrow.
MIND SHIFT #6 - 'Strategy must be reviewed twice a year.'
No, it must be reviewed twice a month at least! If leaders are
responsible for both crafting and executing strategy, it follows
that implementation should be discussed as frequently as
possible. Successful implementation requires conducting
strategy reviews every two weeks. To predict where an
organization will be in two years, do not look at its strategy on
paper. Instead, pay attention to the daily actions its leaders and
staff members take.
Executing strategy
Harvard Business Press Pocket Mentor
Check in informally
Report regularly
Conduct quarterly reviews
suppliers facility caused 20 plants to shut down for five days, the
company decided it needed a second source as a back-up. Toyota
failed to ensure that the accelerator it was receiving from the two
suppliers were identical.
6 ways to build the 5 bridges:
1: Create and use action plans.
Action plans are the cornerstone of effective execution. There are
three steps to creating and using action plans:
Here's what we need to do. Now let's get it done. We've all heard
those words before. We see what happens when great intentions
hit the brick wall of results. Many companies find it hard to align
their objectives with their activities. Effective, consistent
execution is often blocked by conflicting organizational activities,
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