Executing Your Strategy

The fact that both strategists and project managers need to understand the principles set out here is pretty much the key to the whole book, and the authors' approach. The reason, they say, that so many strategies have spectacularly failed to be put into practice effectively, is that strategists have formulated the plans, and then moved on to the next big thing, while project and program managers have got on with doing the work that has been allocated to them, without relating the outputs of their labors in any way to the outcomes their leaders have described in the strategy document. So if you're a strategist or a project or program manager in a large organization, this is a book for you. But it's also a book for people who work in small organizations, and even for individuals who want to manage their careers actively. To prove the point, the authors finish the book by describing how the cyclist Lance Armstrong carried out all six parts of the authors' Strategic Execution Framework in order to achieve his stunning string of Tour de France wins.

This brings us to another important point: You don't need to use the authors' Framework to implement a strategy effectively. But, they say, you do need to do the activities they describe. Lance Armstrong has never met any of the authors, and had likely not heard of their work when he was planning his cycling campaigns. Rather, the things he did were arrived at intuitively. And there's nothing wrong with that. But rather than reinvent the wheel here – no pun intended – the authors save the rest of us time and effort by setting out the way to go about it. And this humility is rather refreshing in a business book.

So, keep listening, and discover why strategy implementation needs to be led from the middle and only supported by the top; why project managers should work on exactly two projects at the same time; and the benefits of holding a wake for canceled projects.

As you've already heard, apart from some interesting introductory and concluding material, this book is largely a manual for the six elements of the authors' Strategic Execution Framework. These six elements are grouped into two sets of three. Slightly surprisingly, given the emphasis on strategy execution in the book's title, the first set is called strategy-making imperatives. What's going on here? Have the authors been tempted by the glitz of strategy formulation after all?

In fact, they haven't. The material on strategy making belongs here, because it's all about ensuring that your strategy can actually be implemented in your situation. For example, if the majority of your staff are skilled in keeping manufacturing costs down and ensuring high quality in order to fulfill a strategy of producing mass-market consumer products, it may simply be too large a step to adopt a new strategy of producing customized innovative solutions for large corporate clients. While this probably could be implemented, at a push, by embarking on a massive culture change program, corporate growth aims would probably be better served by a different strategy – and a lot of time and effort would be saved by coming up with that more appropriate strategy in the first place.

The three inter-dependent elements of strategy-making, then, are Ideation [pronounced: eye-dee-AY-shun], Vision, and Nature. These words aren't necessarily the most revealing descriptions of the activities they involve, so we'll look briefly at each. The authors describe "ideation" as clarifying and communicating the identity, purpose, and long-range intention of the organization. It involves the company's brand image, and also its internal image. When ideation is done well, and you ask any group of staff or customers what the company's about, you'll get a consistent set of answers. Next comes Vision, which involves translating the intention expressed in ideation into strategy, and then developing metrics for measuring the progress in achieving the strategic goals. This section is packed with concepts familiar to Mind Tools readers, including the benefits of appreciative inquiry as opposed to a problem-solving mentality; SMART goals; the importance of purpose; and the concept of Triple Bottom Line reporting.

The third element of strategy-making is Nature, which involves aligning your strategy with your culture and structure. You heard earlier about the importance of ensuring that any new strategic direction is compatible with the existing corporate culture, and the authors go into the subject in more depth here. They outline the features of several different, but common cultures, before explaining how to go about changing culture – a venture that they warn against, unless it's strictly necessary. They then examine the type of structure that's most appropriate for each strategy/culture combination, again emphasizing that it's rare that a single organization, with finite resources, can successfully be more than one main thing.

With the business of plausible strategy-making dealt with, the authors move on to the book's second section. While this is about strategy implementation, it's actually called Project Leadership. Why? Because projects are the vehicles through which strategy is implemented. Some of these projects will be internal, and some external, but implementing a new strategy involves project work. The outcomes of the projects, once completed, will then allow the new strategy to run as business as usual.

The first of the three areas covered in this second section is, as the authors stress, the most important of the whole book. They call it Engagement, and it describes the essential task of linking the strategy-formulation work by top executives, or even strategy consultants, with the managers who will implement it through projects.

In short, strategists need to get out of their ivory towers and get involved in program management by deciding what projects need to be carried out, and with what priorities. Meanwhile, project and program managers need to become what the authors call "strategy savvy," and take an interest in the strategic direction that their work is furthering. They need to learn to focus on outcomes for the business, rather than simply the outputs of their projects, and should be taught how to constantly re-evaluate the work they're doing against the corporate strategy. Effective strategy implementation, then, is led from the middle of the company, by project managers who are supported from the top by the executives and strategists.

The authors cite the example of the satellite phone company Iridium, a Motorola spin-off. The Iridium project took around seven years from inception to launch, and involved putting 66 satellites in space, and developing hugely complex technology that allowed a continuous call to switch between satellites while they orbited the earth. It was a technological and project-management triumph, coming in on time, on budget, and to specification. Unfortunately, in the meantime, regular cell phone networks had developed enormously, and Iridium's market had shrunk to explorers of remote lands and ocean sailors. It was a strategic disaster.

The Iridium case study is a perfect example of what engagement is all about. Several project management staff realized that the work they were doing was becoming obsolete, but the corporate governance structures that their project sat within discouraged them from talking to the strategists. And that's where hands-on strategists could have saved Motorola an awful lot of money. The governance of a project portfolio needs active sponsorship.

Now this is hardly news but, unusually, the authors go into a lot of detail here about the activities that good project sponsorship involves. This is one of the most useful of the many pieces of practical advice this book offers, supported by two excellent checklists: "Most often requested items on the project manager's wish list for effective sponsors" and "Most often requested items on the sponsors' wish list for project managers."

One important element in the engagement area is understanding how much capacity you really have, and what the maximum productivity limit for your project staff really is. Here, the authors cite research showing that when project staff work on two projects rather than one, their productivity goes up from about 60% to 70%. However, if they're allocated work from a third project, this plummets to under 50%. This presents obvious challenges if your portfolio contains a large number smaller projects, and sponsors and program managers both need to understand this kind of thing.

The second element of Project Leadership is Synthesis, which the authors describe as the job of monitoring and aligning project work. They offer some excellent advice here about how to handle the issues surrounding requests for changes to the project specification and the consequent need for rework during a project, and ways of managing interdependencies in complex projects. However, it's not entirely clear why this advice wasn't simply included in the previous section on engagement, as it's really just an extension of the activities covered in that area.

In a way, this doesn't really matter – the key thing is that the activities are in there. It's worth mentioning at this point that the initial letters of the six elements of the Strategic Execution Framework spell out the word INVEST – that's from Ideation, Nature, Vision, Engagement, Synthesis, and Transition. Perhaps that's why the activities of the Engagement and Synthesis sections have been separated, when they might sit better in a single section.

No matter, the authors are forgiven, for they certainly don't labor their pet acronym, as business writers so often do. Indeed, their lack of real interest in it is emphasized by the fact that the book covers Vision before Nature, while the acronym has them the other way around.

Back to the substance of the book, then. The sixth and final area of the Strategic Execution Framework is Transition, or moving project outputs to the mainstream. Again, the concept is familiar, but the authors go into really practical detail on how to handoff completed projects successfully and document the benefits that have been achieved so that learnings can be fed back into the strategy-making process.

They also give some excellent advice about internal projects, which have a tendency to become "immortal" – with the internal customer endlessly asking for small tweaks and additions that the internal supplier continues to spend time on. External projects don't carry this risk, because the customer will have finished paying once the project was completed to scope.

To help ensure that completed projects, and also projects that have been officially abandoned, don't come creeping back, the authors recommend holding small completion parties or "wakes" for the abandoned ones, as a strong signal that the work is well and truly over.

The Strategic Execution Framework this book describes has been shown by the authors to be at the core of successful strategy execution. But this excellent subject matter isn't the only reason why this is such a great book. It's also very well written and structured. Two things stand out.

First, each of the six main chapters ends with two excellent tools for the topic in question. One is a Project List for that topic. For engagement, for instance, this list includes selection criteria development, portfolio governance design, and the education of executives on execution. And there's also a series of "Rate Your Organization" questionnaires for you to use, to evaluate the amount of work your company needs to do on that particular area, if they're to be in a position to execute strategy effectively.

The second feature that makes this such a top-quality book, is the case studies it contains. Many books use case studies, of course, but the authors use them particularly well here. For a start, there are a lot of them, so you're never left feeling, "That's all very well for that example, but it's so far from my situation that I'm none the wiser about what we'd do to cover that point." And there's also a great variety of cases covered. But perhaps most importantly, a few cases run as themes throughout the book, with different aspects of the profiled organization's story drawn out in each of the six sections. As a result, the reader can build up a coherent and memorable understanding of why it's so important that all six elements of the Strategic Execution Framework are in place.

"Executing Your Strategy" by Mark Morgan, Raymond E Levitt, and William Malek is published by Harvard Business School Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights.