Strategy Execution
Rob Lambert
Steve Macaulay
How do you put strategy into practice and why is it so important? Now to
get hold of this issue and explore it we have got in the studio Rob Lambert.
Now Rob why is strategy execution such a key issue?
Rob Lambert
It’s very critical to organisations at the moment. Defining strategy is one
thing. Many organisations are very good at defining goals, aspirational ideas
and strategic imperatives that they need to achieve, but unfortunately
executing that strategy, they are not quite as good at executing the
strategies that they have developed and increasingly with organisations of
today they are under such scrutiny to deliver their goals, their aspirations,
their shareholders, the analysts, look at these strategies that are published,
they meet with the senior executive team or organisations and actually track
are they actually delivering what they have actually promised. So actually
not only coming up with the strategy but being able to execute that, define
and demonstrate clearly we have hit some key performance indicators,
we’ve achieved some particular goals, increasingly important for
organisations.
Steve Macaulay
So if we get down to specifics, what are the key capabilities then that are
required to really deliver this strategy successfully?
Rob Lambert
One major retailer that we are working with actually says thinking. Thinking,
early on, in terms of understanding your strategy, developing a change
portfolio, a strategic change portfolio to deliver that strategy, actually
putting time in place to think about, do we understand the key performance
indicators or strategic goals that we are looking to deliver. Thinking is
perhaps we need a set of change initiatives each of which is going to
contribute to the delivery of that strategy and just putting time in place to
understand each change initiative and actually look at its contribution to a
strategic goal be it improved productivity, increased market share, reduced
time it takes to get a product to market. Thinking and then ensuring you
have a clear alignment between each change initiative and the goals that an
organisation is looking to deliver. Many organisations that we work with
actually rush to IT as a solution. They’ve got a strategic goal for productivity,
they rush out and buy a large software package and say, well that’s it, that’s
the solution, and we say, well let’s think about the change to begin with, so
alignment, understanding each change, what does the solution look like in
terms of business change, but actually also thinking about the resources that
are needed. Now capital is one aspect, but key internal resources are vital to
delivering a successful change, and many organisation we work with
currently do not define the internal resources that are needed to deliver the
change and as we all know most internal resources are probably up to there
with delivering today’s targets so actually aren’t understanding the change
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portfolio, the resource implications as well as the capital implications are
critical.
Steve Macaulay
Let’s take some real world specifics here. When you look at ones that fail, or
strategies that set of really well but actually never make it, what would you
pick as the behavioural and the organisational issues that seem to make
them flounder?
Rob Lambert
Cultural issues crop up time and time again. It’s critical that the leadership
team agree, say for this year or for this six months, these are our prioritised
change initiatives and for the leadership team all as a body to commit to
delivering that change initiatives even though my initiative isn’t up at the
top of the list, so there’s cultural implications, not rushing into it, filtering
out less good ideas, and perhaps ensuring that we have time to think about
it so that when we start to execute those change initiatives we can balance
the resources that are needed with hitting today’s targets because actually
senior management have a tough ask at the moment, a tough set of
problems to manage, they have to deliver today’s targets but they have to
create the organisation of tomorrow, so the issues are cultural and getting
the leadership team to agree what their change portfolio is.
Steve Macaulay
So if you were to put in a nutshell the key message about strategy
execution what would it be?
Rob Lambert
Early planning and early filtering and devoting some good resources to that.
Steve Macaulay
A timely reminder on some very important things. Thank you very much
Rob.
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