Successful Strategy Execution
Strategy Execution – 14 tips to professionalise your strategy communication
Understanding the company strategy is a prerequisite for executing it ? 95% of all employees do not understand their organisation’s strategy!
Here are some tips:
Get the basics right and invest in strategy communication!
- Summarise the vision in an elevator pitch, enabling everyone to re-phrase it and to tell the story to friends and family. An inspiring vision will create a sense of ownership, commitment and energy among your people.
- Continue to communicate in a systematic way and use a blend of communication methods. Organise bottom-up feedback. Personal communication has the most impact!
- Make sure all management levels participate in the communication process. 85% of executive teams spend less than one hour a month discussing and communicating strategy!
- Communicate progress on a continuous basis. Connect with reality. Share best practices, but do not mask bad messages.
Make the vision a reality at all levels of the organisation. Unlock strategic potential.
- Ensure that employees know what is expected of them by translating overall strategy into concrete objectives and actions for their business unit.
- Invite participation and create involvement. Strategy Execution is based on a process of empowering and creating ownership throughout the organisation. Make sure people get real development opportunities. Stimulate learning and enable people to grow when executing strategy. Encourage initiatives and allow people to make mistakes.
- Make sure that everyone understands his/her contribution. Show how individual work contributes to the execution of the strategy. There must be a fit between organisational goals and personal goals. Here comes the question: what’s in it for me? No answer, no action.
Managing strategy is managing change.
- Define the new behaviour required for executing the strategy.
- Define not only “what” needs to be done but also “how” it needs to be done.
- Make the new behaviour real by illustrating what kind of behaviour is “out” and what is new.
- Behaviour counts ? and it starts with the management! Disengaged leaders can never inspire their people ? be aware of the impact of the management’s level of commitment.
Appreciate people, but dare to make the difference.
- Make sure that people understand the specific link to the strategy!
- Make sure you have an effective performance management process based on 3 major steps: the set-up of individual objectives, the mid-year review, and the evaluation at the end of the year. Make sure your management has the required skills to manage this process properly.
- Acknowledge success ? individual performance must be monitored and managed. Praise those who out-perform their objectives, and make a clear distinction between high-performers and low-performers! Make sure your reward system truly differentiates between good and poor performance! Ensure transparency!
About the Author
Jeroen De Flander, international Strategy Execution / Performance Management expert, invites you to develop your Strategy Execution skills by visiting the free performance library http://www.the-performance-factory.com/en/free-performance-library/ Building your strategy execution skills will help you to get the job done – to turn your great strategy into great performance. To start learning, set-up a free membership account today: http://www.the-performance-factory.com/
Gary Harpst
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Worms Armageddon $18.50 Have fun with the Worms double pack together on one disc! Enter the bizarre and fantastic cartoon world where you wreak havoc on your rivals in a game of revenge and petty-minded cruelty. Get ready for an all out strategy game…are you up for the challenge for Worms Armageddon and Worms 2?… |
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The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge (Harvard Business Review) $17.55 Companies can’t survive without innovating. But most put far more emphasis on generating Big Ideas than on executing them—turning ideas into actual breakthrough products, services, and process improvements.That’s because “ideating” is energizing and glamorous. By contrast, execution seems like humdrum, behind-the-scenes dirty work. But without execution, Big Ideas go nowhere.In The… |
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The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage $21.15 In a world of stiffening competition, business strategy is more crucial than ever. Yet most organizations struggle in this area–not with formulating strategy but with executing it, or putting their strategy into action. Owing to execution failures, companies realize just a fraction of the financial performance promised in their strategic plans. It doesn’t have to be that way, maintain Robert Kapl… |
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Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business (Wiley Trading) $31.42 While institutional traders continue to implement quantitative (or algorithmic) trading, many independent traders have wondered if they can still challenge powerful industry professionals at their own game? The answer is “yes,” and in Quantitative Trading, Dr. Ernest Chan, a respected independent trader and consultant, will show you how. Whether you’re an independent “retail” trader looking to sta… |
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Around the Buoys: A Manual of Sailboat Racing Tactics and Strategy $19.92 New – No other recreation combines so many elements–speed, tactics, strategy, timing, execution–and penalizes a failure in any one of these so brutally as sailboat racing. Successful racing depends on putting all elements together, and the winning mix changes with each new leg of the race. “Around the Buoys” looks at the racecourse leg by leg, buoy rounding by buoy rounding, gathering together the relevant strategic, tactical, boatspeed, and rule considerations where they apply, and showing ho |
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Around the Buoys: A Manual of Sailboat Racing Tactics and Strategy $17.02 New – No other recreation combines so many elements–speed, tactics, strategy, timing, execution–and penalizes a failure in any one of these so brutally as sailboat racing. Successful racing depends on putting all elements together, and the winning mix changes with each new leg of the race. “Around the Buoys” looks at the racecourse leg by leg, buoy rounding by buoy rounding, gathering together the relevant strategic, tactical, boatspeed, and rule considerations where they apply, and showing ho |
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Beating Low Cost Competition: How Premium Brands can respond to Cut-Price Rivals $34.95 “A very useful step-by-step approach to guide managers towards creating their own answers for winning against low-cost competition.” Yves Serra, President and CEO, Georg Fischer, Schaffhausen, Switzerland “Low cost competition has moved from being an out-of-the-box concept to changing the way business gets done. It is an issue for every industry and this book has insights that are practical and relevant for every manager. Adrian Ryans has put together a compelling storyline that is a must read for tomorrow’s successful leader.” Arkadi Kuhlmann, CEO, ING Direct, Wilmington, Delaware, USA “The single biggest competitive threat faced by multinational companies operating in low cost environments, does not come from the Low Cost Competitors, but rather from your company’s ability to fully grasp the massive threat in time and understand how to deal with it successfully. This book – your survival guide for dealing with low cost competitors – will enable you to understand and devise an execution-focused strategy to meet your specific competitive challenge. Make sure your CEO and country managers read this book from cover to cover.” Lars A. Andersen, President, Vestas China, Beijing, China “Adrian Ryans has clearly highlighted the challenges of competing to win in the global economy. Competitors from Asia are no longer producing low cost, low quality products that are not competitive. Rather the same companies that needed help from market leaders ten years ago and were used as low cost suppliers are now world-class competitors in their own right. Beating Low Cost Competition frames the nature of the competitive game for the next generation of executives. Answer the questions at the end of each chapter of Beating Low Cost Competition; if the answers don’t scare you today, they might |
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Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last Twenty-five Years $26.9 In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson called an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. The man assumed he was being fired. Watson told him, “Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons.” In Billion Dollar Lessons, Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui draw on research into more than 750 business failures to reveal the misguided tactics that mire companies over and over. There are thousands of books about successful companies but virtually none about the lessons to be learned from those that crash and burn. Lesson One: The cold hard facts are that between 1981 and 2006, 423 major companies with combined assets totaling $1.5 trillion filed for bankruptcy. Lesson Two: The number one cause of failure was misguided strategy – not sloppy execution, poor leadership, or bad luck. These strategic errors include pursuing nonexistent synergies; moving into an “adjacent” market that isn’t really adjacent and buying more problems than efficiencies through misguided consolidation.Billion Dollar Lessons provides proven methods that managers, boards, and even investors can adopt to avoid making the same mistakes. It draws on vivid examples to help you thoroughly assess potentially disastrous strategies before they bring your company down. Think of Billion Dollar Lessons as the flip side of Good to Great, but just as eye opening and essential as that business classic. Billion Dollar Lessons will keep you from going from good to gone. |
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Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last Twenty-five Years $12.99 Welcome to Business Failure 101In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson called an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. Watson asked the man if he knew why he’d been called in. The man said he assumed he was being fired. Watson told him, “Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons.”In Billion-Dollar Lessons, Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui draw on research into more than 750 business failures to reveal the misguided tactics that mire companies again and again. There are thousands of books about successful companies but virtually none about the lessons to be learned from those that crash and burn. Lesson One: The Cold Hard FactsBetween 1981 and 2006, 423 major publicly held U.S. companies with combined assets totaling $1.5 trillion filed for bankruptcy. Hundreds more took huge write-offs, discontinued major operations, or were acquired under duress. Again and again, companies follow the same wrong-headed strategies that brought down businesses in the past. The sub-prime mortgage crisis that cost companies tens of billions of dollars in 2007 and 2008 echoes the ill-conceived strategies that pushed Green Tree Financial and Conseco into bankruptcy years earlier. Tom Watson’s executive’s $10 million lesson seems cheap by comparison. Lesson Two: Failure PatternsCarroll and Mui found that the number one cause of failure was misguided strategy—not sloppy execution, poor leadership, or bad luck. These strategic errors fall into seven categories, including:*Pursuing nonexistent synergies: Quaker Oats’ purchase of Snapple was supposed to capitalize on distribution synergies but instead led to a $1.7 billion write-off.*Moving into an “adjacent” market that isn’t really adjacent: Avon decided its “culture of caring” qualified it to operate retirement homes. Subsequent write-offs totaled $545 million.*Buying more |
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Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results $15.31 Used – In “Collaboration”, author Morten Hansen takes aim at what many leaders inherently know: in today’s competitive environment, companywide collaboration is an imperative for successful strategy execution, yet the sought-after synergies are rarely, if ever, realized. In fact, most cross-unit collaborative efforts end up wasting time, money, and resources. How can managers avoid the costly traps of collaboration and instead start getting the results they need? In this book, Hansen shows manag |
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Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results $17 Used – In “Collaboration”, author Morten Hansen takes aim at what many leaders inherently know: in today’s competitive environment, companywide collaboration is an imperative for successful strategy execution, yet the sought-after synergies are rarely, if ever, realized. In fact, most cross-unit collaborative efforts end up wasting time, money, and resources. How can managers avoid the costly traps of collaboration and instead start getting the results they need? In this book, Hansen shows manag |
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Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results $15.38 New – In “Collaboration”, author Morten Hansen takes aim at what many leaders inherently know: in today’s competitive environment, companywide collaboration is an imperative for successful strategy execution, yet the sought-after synergies are rarely, if ever, realized. In fact, most cross-unit collaborative efforts end up wasting time, money, and resources. How can managers avoid the costly traps of collaboration and instead start getting the results they need? In this book, Hansen shows manage |
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Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results $32 In Collaboration, author Morten Hansen takes aim at what many leaders inherently know: in today’s competitive environment, companywide collaboration is an imperative for successful strategy execution, yet the sought-after synergies are rarely, if ever, realized. In fact, most cross-unit collaborative efforts end up wasting time, money, and resources. How can managers avoid the costly traps of collaboration and instead start getting the results they need?In this book, Hansen shows managers how to get collaboration right through “disciplined collaboration”— a practical framework and set of tools managers can use to:• Assess when—and when not—to pursue collaboration across units to achieve goals• Identify and overcome the four barriers to collaboration• Get people to buy into the larger picture, even when they own only a small piece of it• Be a “T-Shaped Manager,” collaborating across divisions while still working deeply in your own unit• Create networks across the organization that are not large, but nimble and effective Based on the author’s long-running research, in-depth case studies, and company interviews, Collaboration delivers practical advice and tools to help your organization collaborate—for real results. |
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Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results $20.09 New – In “Collaboration”, author Morten Hansen takes aim at what many leaders inherently know: in today’s competitive environment, companywide collaboration is an imperative for successful strategy execution, yet the sought-after synergies are rarely, if ever, realized. In fact, most cross-unit collaborative efforts end up wasting time, money, and resources. How can managers avoid the costly traps of collaboration and instead start getting the results they need? In this book, Hansen shows manage |
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Design for Six SIGMA $124.95 Six Sigma provides an overarching concept, methodology and the tools to improve quality and customer satisfaction, thereby increasing profitability. This book moves beyond applying Six Sigma to already existing products and services to quantifying, designing and measuring success in from the start.Most new ideas are launched on the market without taking customer needs into account. Failings are discovered in the marketplace where products or services then have to be refined and redesigned – indeed perhaps some 80% of new products or services will fail altogether. By using the Six Sigma approach to designing new products and services the chances of failure are greatly reduced. Six Sigma encourages innovation within a controlled framework, leading to better products and services brought to the marketplace more quickly. This book aims to provide a detailed resource of guidance and inspiration covering all the aspects of business strategy, product/service design, project management and execution necessary for the successful introduction of new products and services, all under the auspices of a customer-focused Six Sigma approach. Moreover it provides a tangible way of measuring satisfaction and the success of the new. The ability of Six Sigma as a corporate strategy for excellent customer quality has been clearly demonstrated in the growing number of organizations to adopt this approach. However, the real prize lies with ‘advanced’ Six Sigma applied directly to the design and implementation of new products and services and which fulfil customer needs and requirements from day one. This book provides a detailed resource of guidance and inspiration covering all the aspects of business strategy, design, project management and execution necessary for the successful introduction of new products and services under the auspices of a customer-focused Six Sigma approach. With a clear discussion of all the aspects that contribute to the commercial design and launch |
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Design for Six SIGMA $124.95 Six Sigma provides an overarching concept, methodology and the tools to improve quality and customer satisfaction, thereby increasing profitability. This book moves beyond applying Six Sigma to already existing products and services to quantifying, designing and measuring success in from the start.Most new ideas are launched on the market without taking customer needs into account. Failings are discovered in the marketplace where products or services then have to be refined and redesigned – indeed perhaps some 80% of new products or services will fail altogether. By using the Six Sigma approach to designing new products and services the chances of failure are greatly reduced. Six Sigma encourages innovation within a controlled framework, leading to better products and services brought to the marketplace more quickly. This book aims to provide a detailed resource of guidance and inspiration covering all the aspects of business strategy, product/service design, project management and execution necessary for the successful introduction of new products and services, all under the auspices of a customer-focused Six Sigma approach. Moreover it provides a tangible way of measuring satisfaction and the success of the new. The ability of Six Sigma as a corporate strategy for excellent customer quality has been clearly demonstrated in the growing number of organizations to adopt this approach. However, the real prize lies with ‘advanced’ Six Sigma applied directly to the design and implementation of new products and services and which fulfil customer needs and requirements from day one. This book provides a detailed resource of guidance and inspiration covering all the aspects of business strategy, design, project management and execution necessary for the successful introduction of new products and services under the auspices of a customer-focused Six Sigma approach. With a clear discussion of all the aspects that contribute to the commercial design and launch |
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Design for Six Sigma: Launching New Products and Services Without Failure $120.88 Used – This guide moves beyond applying Six Sigma to already existing products and services to quantifying, designing and measuring success right from the start. The book proceeds from the basis that Six Sigma encourages innovation within a controlled framework, leading to better products and services being brought to the marketplace more quickly. It covers all aspects of business strategy, product and service design, project management and execution necessary for the successful introduction of |
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Design for Six Sigma: Launching New Products and Services Without Failure $70.05 Used – This guide moves beyond applying Six Sigma to already existing products and services to quantifying, designing and measuring success right from the start. The book proceeds from the basis that Six Sigma encourages innovation within a controlled framework, leading to better products and services being brought to the marketplace more quickly. It covers all aspects of business strategy, product and service design, project management and execution necessary for the successful introduction of |
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Drug Interdiction: Partnerships, Legal Principles, and Investigative Methodologies for Law Enforcement, Second Edition $99.95 As drug trafficking and the abuse of illicit drugs continue to inflict untold harm upon our society, it is clear that a global initiative and an intense domestic strategy are vital to address the sophisticated drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) that are prevalent in many regions. Covering a wide array of domestic interdiction topics, Drug Interdiction: Partnerships, Legal Principles, and Investigative Methodologies for Law Enforcement, Second Edition is the most comprehensive drug interdiction book available, providing a “how-to” step-by-step guide for all law enforcement officers.Explores the gamut of interdiction scenariosDrawing on their multiple years of experience, the authors explore a range of issues that confront today’s drug interdiction officer. The book explains how to initiate specific domestic drug interdiction programs and discusses how to use business partnerships to assist law enforcement in identifying potential violators who use legitimate businesses to facilitate the drug trade. It examines consensual encounters, the use of drug canines, and interdictions involving trains, buses, airports, and rental vehicles. Wide-ranging in scope, the text also covers interdictions at hotels and those involving storage units and parcel systems. The book includes a chapter on currency seizures as well as chapters on report writing, courtroom testimony, and the role of the interdiction supervisor. Each chapter includes relevant case law that supports the protocol described.Reliable techniques, tested in the fieldThe techniques presented in this volume are tried and true methods, utilized by the authors as part of many years of successful narcotics investigations. The unbeatable methods are deeply rooted in case law to ensure proper execution of the practices described, and admissibility in court of the evidence seized.What’s New in the Second Edition:Updated |
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Embedded Processor-Based Self-Test $239 Embedded Processor-Based Self-Test is a guide to self-testing strategies for embedded processors. Embedded processors are regularly used today in most System-on-Chips (SoCs). Testing of microprocessors and embedded processors has always been a challenge because most traditional testing techniques fail when applied to them. This is due to the complex sequential structure of processor architectures, which consists of high performance datapath units and sophisticated control logic for performance optimization. Structured Design-for-Testability (DfT) and hardware-based self-testing techniques, which usually have a non-trivial impact on a circuit’s performance, size and power, can not be applied without serious consideration and careful incorporation into the processor design.Embedded Processor-Based Self-Test shows how the powerful embedded functionality that processors offer can be utilized as a self-testing resource. Through a discussion of different strategies the book emphasizes on the emerging area of Software-Based Self-Testing (SBST). SBST is based on the idea of execution of embedded software programs to perform self-testing of the processor itself and its surrounding blocks in the SoC. SBST is a low-cost strategy in terms of overhead (area, speed, power), development effort and test application cost, as it is applied using low-cost, low-speed test equipment.Embedded Processor-Based Self-Test can be used by designers, DfT engineers, test practitioners, researchers and students working on digital testing, and in particular processor and SoC test. This book sets the framework for comparisons among different SBST methodologies by discussing key requirements. It presents successful applications of SBST to a number of embedded processors of different complexities and instruction set architectures. |
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Escape the Improvement Trap: Five Ingredients Missing in Most Improvement Recipes $51.95 Written by two experts who have dedicated their careers to quality improvement, Escape the Improvement Trap: Five Ingredients Missing in Most Improvement Recipes separates itself from other improvement books by looking at why most companies rarely achieve anything more than an average level of improvement maturity. They identify five critical ingredients required for successful improvement:1. A meaningful business value proposition and strategy that drives key improvement actions2. An engaging environment where people can do their best work3. A focus on meaningful metrics while avoiding irrelevant details4. Process improvement efforts that maximize cross-functional process performance and foster deeper process understanding, innovation, and execution of best work practices5. An executive mindset that focuses on customer value, people development, process performance, and business improvement outcomes, not solely on savingsThe authors consider a variety of situations at Independence Enterprise, a fictional company, based on their own very real experiences. They elaborate on the principles that should come into play, look at what Independence Enterprise is doing right and wrong, and suggest deployment actions to help you apply the principles to your own organization. |
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Essence of Marketing $25 The Essence of Marketing presents an easy-to-understand perspective of what marketing is–and what it is not–in the real world. Dr. Bob Kimball starts where theory ends, and illustrates how old-time theories and practices have been turned on their ear by innovative professionals who understand how to reach their target market and build the consumer franchise. Seasoned marketing professionals and small business entrepreneurs alike will discover action-packed ideas to help them more successfully market their products and services, building a successful marketing strategy on the foundation of implementation and execution. |
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Executing Your Strategy $32.95 Ninety percent of businesses still fail to execute their strategies because their leaders do not understand how to break each strategy down into groups of activities and sequences of events that drive the company steadily toward its desired goal. Beyond that, managers often fail to prioritize these activities, assign responsibility for them, and decide on measures of their success. The authors argue that successful project design translates into successful strategic execution and that projects provide the critical link between knowing the strategy and living into it. |
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Execution Plain and Simple: Twelve Steps to Achieving Any Goal on Time and on Budget $0.01 Specific Steps to Accelerate Achievement of Goals and Turn Strategy Into Payoff, for Those Who Have To Execute.Robert A. Neiman has helped major corporations achieve major gains in performance and profitability. He has put his experience on paper for managers who know their organizations have much more potential, can and must do better, and who need to overcome busyness, delays, diversions, and other barriers. His 12-steps provide specific guidance. They fill gaps in the literature about goal setting, execution, project management, leadership and change, and answer front line questions such as:How do I take responsibility? How do I define and get commitment on assignments? How do I organize the best team for the job? How do I shape a strategy that will work? How do I get things moving? How do I make demands effectively? How do I follow up like crazy without driving people crazy? How do I use politics to advantage? How do I solve the problems, cut through fatigue and apathy? “Bob Neiman has it right—execution is key to business success. Great strategies alone cannot drive winning results. While successful execution isn’t simple, the potential payoff is big for companies and their people.”—Frederick M. Poses, Chairman and CEO, American Standard”Bob Neiman’s years of experience . . . are reflected in this book in his simple and straightforward style. Even experienced ‘winners’ will find this book valuable.”—Bernard Hengesbaugh, Chairman and CEO (Ret.), CNA Financial”His 12 steps will help energized managers excel, procrastinators produce, delay addicts recover, dawdlers deliver, and strategists act. Apply the concepts with ZEST, and you will produce results”. —Dave Ulrich, Professor, School of Business, University of Michigan and co-author of GE Workout and When The Bottom Line Isn’tRobert A. Neiman is a Harvard M.B.A. and a partner in the management consulting |