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Malek to Speak at Annual SIMposium Conference- Magic of IT: Bridging the Past, Present and Future
More than 700 highly influential IT decision-makers and purchasers will gather at SIMposium 08: Magic of IT: Bridging the Past, Present, and Future to discuss current business issues, identify industry best practices, and lay the foundation for developing business alliances.
Bozeman, MT September 30, 2008-
William Malek, CEO of Strategy2Reality will be a featured speaker at the upcoming SIMposium annual conference held in Orlando, Florida. He will present on November 12th at 9:30 a.m. His presentation will cover Strategic Leadership: How to Avoid Five Deadly Sins.
CIOs and enterprise architects often take an analytical and logical approach where a blue print is made to translate the strategic vision into IT solutions. However, this approach does not always succeed. His presentation will focus on systemic organizational issues that can explain the challenges CIOs and architects are facing.
Malek will explore the key pitfalls that derail IT strategy planning and implementation efforts and the guiding principles that are anecdotes for driving the development of organizational clarity and alignment. He will discuss specific failure modes that challenge almost every organization in planning and implementing a portfolio of strategic project work to execute an organization’s strategy or even a major program or project.
William Malek has more than 30 years of corporate experience in strategic planning, performance management consulting, and organizational development. His mastery of effective group planning techniques, strategic leadership, and his dynamic presence as a trainer and facilitator has earned him an international reputation as a keynote speaker, workshop leader, strategic consultant, and author, which includes his new book, Executing Your Strategy: How to Break it Down & Get it Done.
Malek has held executive positions such as CEO of IPSolutions as well as facilitating Fortune 500 senior management teams in companies such as IBM, Qualcomm, Cisco, McKesson, and the Library of Congress. A few of his certifications include a Stanford Certified Project Manager (SCPM), a Project Management Professional (PMP®), and a New Product Development Professional (NPDP).
Harvard Business School Press Release for Executing Your Strategy — now available at Amazon.com!
CONTACT: Susan Minio, Senior Publicist Harvard Business School Press P: (617) 783-7569; F: (617) 783-7489 E: sminio@hbsp.harvard.edu
EXECUTING YOUR STRATEGY How to Break It Down and Get It Done By Mark Morgan, Raymond E. Levitt, and William Malek
The global business landscape is littered with expensive, well-intended strategies that failed in the execution phase. Some of these doomed strategies make the front pages and the evening news. Many more die quietly or simply disappear into desk drawers and forgotten PowerPoint presentations. But all represent a significant drain on resources that could have been used more profitably elsewhere.
What explains these failures of strategic execution? In many cases, executives lack a systematic approach for identifying and implementing the right array of actions needed to deliver on their promised strategies. Worse, they make broad—and mistaken—assumptions about how well the strategy they have in mind converts into understandable work at all levels of the organization. They also overestimate their company’s ability to effect the changes necessary to implement their latest strategic vision.
Even when executives do break their plans into clearly defined and doable chunks of work, they don’t necessarily collaborate with leaders of strategic initiatives to prioritize and stage the necessary investments. Many also neglect to revise their company’s portfolio of strategic initiatives to fit the demands of a dynamic business environment. Others lose touch with these initiatives when the outcomes (new products, services, skills, and capabilities) are transferred to operations. No longer in tune with the practical ramifications of their strategy, they’re unable to determine whether the implemented strategy is delivering as promised.
In EXECUTING YOUR STRATEGY: How to Break It Down and Get It Done, Mark Morgan, Raymond E. Levitt, and William Malek explain how executives can strengthen the odds that their organization will transform strategies into action that generates the desired business results. The authors identify six imperatives that leaders must continually address and align to ensure that they are defining the right strategic projects—and implementing those projects right:
1. Ideation—how to clarify and communicate the company’s identity (its inherent value), purpose (its reason for being in business), and long-range intention (what it will create in five, ten, twenty, or more years into the future).
2. Vision—tactics for translating the identity, purpose, and long-range intention into clear goals and metrics that enable leaders to determine whether goals have been achieved.
3. Nature—a framework for aligning the organization’s strategy, culture (the values it cherishes and the kinds of people, activities, and achievements it celebrates), and structure (including decision authority, reporting relationships, information flows, and performance evaluation and incentive systems).
4. Engagement—a process for managing the company’s portfolio of strategic initiatives dynamically, so that the right mix of projects is continuously redefined to execute its strategy in the face of rapidly evolving markets and technologies; and so that strategic projects receive continuous reviews for ongoing relevance, and adequate resources (time, money, skills, equipment, and attention) to succeed.
5. Synthesis—methods for monitoring and aligning project work to ensure that all scarce resources —especially scarce human resources — are being dynamically deployed to maximize strategic benefits.
6. Transition—how to move the results of strategic projects into the mainstream of the company’s operations, so the organization can rapidly reap the projects’ benefits. These six imperatives provide a crucial roadmap for any organization—not just for-profit corporations—seeking to successfully carry out its strategies. The imperatives guide individual efforts as well.
The authors mine a rich array of examples (successes as well as stumbles) that range from AT&T and American Power Conversion to Airbus, from Wipro and Yahoo! to Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France teams.
Consider, for instance, the Singapore National Library Board, which achieved outstanding operational results by applying the imperatives distilled in this book. To define the right strategy, the organization articulated an ideation that included a clear purpose: “To support the advancement of Singapore” and “to inform, educate, and entertain.” Its vision included the goal of helping Singapore to become a “first league developed country” as measured by criteria such as economic dynamism and quality of life. And SNLB’s efforts on the nature imperative included building a management team that would boost staff confidence, reduce resistance to change, and support a flexible structure. To lead strategic projects effectively, SNLB attended to engagement and synthesis by investing in and monitoring a project portfolio that included training hundreds of people in project management methodology, providing coaching for program managers, and establishing discipline for technical change management. And it ensured transition by sustaining its strategic execution approach over six years of dedicated effort, starting in 2000.
Thanks to its attention to the imperatives laid out in the book, this government agency effected substantive change relatively quickly and gained remarkable results—including increased loan rates, reduced queues, and a major jump in new memberships without addition of new staff. Filled with practical advice, compelling real-world examples, and hands-on diagnostic tools at the conclusion of each chapter, this new resource enables leaders in any organization to make strategy happen.
About the Authors:
Mark Morgan is Chief Learning Officer at IPSolutions Inc. and is the Practice Director of the Stanford Advanced Project Management Program.
Raymond E. Levitt is a Professor in Stanford University’s Engineering School, Director of Stanford’s Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects, and Academic Director of the Stanford Advanced Project Management Program.
William Malek, Strategy Execution Officer for Strategy2Reality LLC, is an independent consultant, trainer, and former CEO of IPSolutions, Inc., and was the Stanford APM Program Director from 2002 to 2006.
EXECUTING YOUR STRATEGY How to Break It Down and Get It Done By Mark Morgan, Raymond E. Levitt, and William Malek Harvard Business Press Publication Date: January 7, 2008 Price: $29.95; Pages: 304; ISBN: 978-1-59139-956-8 http://www.hbspress.org