Synaptus

Two very interesting sources for discussion on connecting strategy and execution. If you haven’t read Larry Bossidy’s book, Execution, you will find an interesting perspective on how to achieve this. Businessweek has executive summary available. He does a very good job of discussing the forces at work that makes executing strategy so important and so difficult today and provides a framework for getting there. Then, the key take away for me from the book, is the discussion of the three key processes of execution. He points out that many businesses treat their people, strategy, and operations processes as independent entities when in fact they are interdependent. Bossidy suggests it is the role of management to become intimately familiar with all three of these processes and to drive the alignment from the top.

The American Management Association’s Winter 2006-2007 Journal is all about the search for Strategic Alignment. In the article, How to get Strategic Alignment, they break the management challenges into Organizational Leadership, Operational Leadership, and People Leadership.

Both of these are worth the time to read through. Learning to align the interdependent aspects of strategy, process, and people in organizations driven by knowledge work and constant change is the top management challenge we face today. If you are still managing these in an ad-hoc or independent way, it is time to look for a systematic approach to achieving strategic alingment.

Tom Peters is an inspiring thought leader. A post on his blog today highlights how important it is for management to be able to align strategy and culture.

"A beautifully crafted strategy can fail when the employees in various divisions within an organization clash. Logically, we think that strategy should drive behavior, but, in reality, it’s the culture—underlying norms, values, belief systems—that dictates how effectively people work together. Employees’ behavior has direct impact on the bottom line, costs, revenue streams, level of productivity, customer satisfaction, even the brand—every aspect of the business is affected. If strategy and culture are not aligned, the culture may support behaviors that conflict with what has to get done—and actually block execution of the strategy."

I have worked in a Fortune 500 in the last year where the focus was on making sure everyone got along. Clearly there was some understanding that conflict wasted a tremendous amount of energy in businesses. Anything that lead to conflict was undiscussable. This made it impossible to point out where what someone was doing wasn’t helping get the job done. It also made change very difficult to implement. The behavior’s that were intended to reduce the conflict clearly blocked the execution of the strategy.

Notably, this is a ubiquitious problem that effects  almost every company we engage in. Most companies lack an effective way to connect strategy and culture in an actionable way. Developing and communicating strategy is itself a daunting task. Deliberately shaping culture can be overwhelming. If you agree that culture must be aligned with strategy, what are you doing to make it happen? Do you have a systematic way to make sure the culture and behaviors are creating results aligned with the strategy.