Barriers to Success – Strategy or Execution?
Ideas in Action :
The following was taken from an article written by Uday Arur
Barriers to Success – Strategy or Execution?
Recent studies have shown that organizations that have gone through the effort of developing a written strategy fail miserably at execution. According to Paul Niven in his book “The Balanced Scorecard”:
Only 10% of organizations execute their strategy
Only 25% of managers and executives have incentives linked to strategy
85% of executive teams spend less than 1 hour per month on strategy
60% of organizations don’t link budgets to strategy
Who will our customers be? How many will we have?
Those are pretty dismal facts about commitment and results as they pertain to strategy execution.
However, Roger Martin (The Execution Trap, HBR July-August 2010), believes that the idea that a strategy can be brilliant and execution poor is flawed.
To Martin, the flaw stems from the common metaphor used to illustrate the opposing views regarding strategy execution – the one where the organizations “thinkers” come up with the strategy and doers “execute”.
Instead, Martin proposes an alternative metaphor, which he believes can correct the flaw in the thinking. He compares the organization with a white-water river, where choices cascade down from upstream to downstream in the organizational hierarchy. This approach would enable more freedom to adapt decisions to the specifics of the environment in which each organizational level operates, all within a larger framework and direction given by the strategy (the river). Unlike the strategy-execution approach, in which leaders dictate and set strategies and expect subordinates to mechanically follow, the choice-cascade model has senior managers empower workers by allowing them to use their best judgement in the scenarios they encounter. But, says Martin, to effectively enable those individual choices, a choice maker “upstream” must set the context for the downstream.
Martin suggests four ways the choice maker can help his employees make better choices:
Explain the choice that has been made and the rationale for it
Explicitly identify the next downstream choice
Assist in making the downstream choice as needed
Commit to revisiting and modifying the choice based on downstream feedback
Because downstream choices are valued and feedback is encouraged, the framework enables employees to send information back upstream, improving the knowledge base of decision makers higher up and enabling everyone in the organization to make better choices. And when workers are made to feel empowered, the whole organization wins!
The first metaphor, which treats strategy separate from execution, can be associated with a mechanistic, command and control thinking, whereas, what Martin seems to suggest is an organic, systems thinking with an interrelated, integrated view of strategy.
Which side are you on?
Uday Arur CMC, CEQM, CBA
Business Coach
www.arurbizcoach.com
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