Ecuador

Putting Strategy
to Work
In this collection, you’ll learn how to help your company execute its strategy by:
Articulating in simple, memorable terms what your company will and won’t do
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to compete
Pressure-testing assumptions underlying your strategy
Ensuring that information flows to all who’ll execute your strategy
Clarifying decision rights
Separating operationaland strategic discussions
Jump to Article:
2 Three Keys to Effective Execution
by Melissa Raffoni
4 Transforming Corner-Office Strategy into
Frontline Action
by Orit Gadiesh and James L. Gilbert
15 Stop Wasting Valuable Time
by Michael C. Mankins
product #14949
26 Turning Great Strategy into Great
Performance
by Michael C. Mankins and Richard Steele
www.hbr.org
38 Promise-BasedManagement: The Essence of
Execution
by Donald N. Sull and Charles Spinosa
Quick Read
How to translate strategy into
execution?
Communicate the key „
objectives—again and again
and again.
Assign ownership of each „
objective.
Track the success of each „
objective.
Candidly discuss obstacles to „
success.
copyright © 2009 harvard business school publishing corporation. allrights reserved.
Harvardbusiness.org
Even the most brilliant strategies frequently fail during execution.
Here’s how to avoid that fate.
Co n v e r s a t i o n st a r t e r
Three Keys to Effective
Execution
by Melissa Raffoni
Founder of Raffoni CEO Consulting.
Find more content on strategy execution at
http://harvardbusiness.org/resources/strategy.
Strategic planning gets all thecachet and all the ink, but the most creative, visionary
strategic planning is useless if it isn’t translated into action. Especially now, in a sluggish
economy, execution takes on greater importance. It’s what separates the companies that
prosper in hard times from the ones that go under.
Why can even the most brilliant strategies founder in the implementation phase? “When
things haven’t goneas planned, it’s often because the process wasn’t well defined, we missed
a step, or we didn’t follow a specific sequence,” says Gordon Woodfall, former president and
general manager of Waltham, Mass.–based Thermo KeyTek (now Thermo Fisher Scientific).
The execution phase forces you to translate your broad-brush conceptual understanding of
your company’s strategy into an intimate familiaritywith how it will all happen: who will
take on which tasks in what sequence, how long those tasks will take, how much they’ll cost,
and how they’ll affect subsequent activities.
Here are three recommendations to help you make this translation.
1. Communicate the key points.
It’s difficult to convey every nuance of a strategic plan throughout a large corporation.
Making sure that mostemployees are clear about their roles in achieving the most critical
80% of the plan is usually more important than communicating the remaining 20% to
everyone.
Distill the strategic plan down to its most crucial points, and focus on communicating those.
Tim Stratman, former CEO of Chicago-based RRD Direct, attributes his organization’s success
during his tenure to “simple, clear objectives thatwere commonly understood throughout
the organization.” Select team members visited every manufacturing site and sales office
every other month to deliver the same four or five messages.
page 2
Three Keys to Effective Communication
At UPS, quick daily meetings kept
everyone on track, says Tom Weidemeyer,
retired COO and a 31-year veteran of
the company. “First thing every day,
there was amandatory three-minute
communication meeting to reinforce
objectives and uncover issues. This added
up to more than 4 million hours of
communication per year.”
Instead of the standard one-way
communication road show, Bob
Zagotta, former CEO of Chicago-based
consultancy Fourth Floor (now part
of Project Leadership Associates),
encourages clients “to do full- or halfday
deployment...