Does Your Organization Lack Strategic Execution Capabilities?

While businesses have spent more than a trillion dollars on business management consulting and training in the past decade, research shows that a large majority of organizations are still failing to execute their strategies effectively.  In additon, in the past six years, the rate of CEO churn has never been greater due, in part, to poor organizational performance and the leadership competencies required to effectively plan and execute a strategy.

Why? Many executives are missing several crucial process disciplines necessary to align the enterprise and are not getting to the core strategy execution questions that would enable successful management practices to get the right work done.  Furthermore, Richard Rumelt, a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management points out, “Most corporate ‘strategic plans’ have little to do with strategy. They are simply three-year or five-year rolling resource budgets and some sort of market share projection. Calling it ‘strategic planning’ creates false expectations that the exercise will somehow produce a coherent strategy.”  

Our approach to implementing this major improvement opportunity for an organization involves designing a systematic process for aligning and creating linkage between key areas of an enterprise's business functions. The framework theory for these organizational performance systems is discussed in our co-authored book Executing Your Strategy published by the Harvard Business School Press and is based on a leading Stanford University executive education program called Advanced Project Management.

Where to Start? In order to realize the benefits of any strategy execution framework you might adopt, we have developed 12 Strategy-to-Action Alignment Workshops which are designed with some of the best research-based planning practices in business.  We use an innovative set of group facilitation techniques and methods such as action learning, visual strategy mapping, integrative thinking, and structured dialogue to promote the discipline of “stratxology”—the art and science of strategy execution leadership. This discipline leads to integrative systems thinking and organizational alignment, two fundamental success factors for establishing any Strategy Execution Office or performance transformation initiative.

The Center of Excellence for Strategic Leadership and Facilitation

“Without question William is one of the most effective facilitators of the strategic planning process that I have seen. He successfully led nearly 40 senior leaders through strategy design for one of our most complex, cross-functional initiatives to date. William knows strategic planning extremely well, is capable of leading diverse groups through the process, and has the talent of making it all fun.” Michelle Fleury, Senior Manager, Cisco Systems