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KNOWLEDGE FINDER
KNOWLEDGE FINDERbook reviews
Mark Morgan is Chief Learning Officer at IPSolutions Inc. and Practice Director of the Stanford Advanced Project Management Program.
Raymond E. Levitt is a Professor at Stanford University's Engineering School and Academic Director of the Stanford Advanced Project Management Program.
William Malek is Strategy Execution Officer for Strategy2Reality and an independent consultant and trainer.
Executing Your Strategy
Mark Morgan, Raymond E. Levitt, William Malek
Failure to execute a strategy correctly is said to be the reason why so many potentially effective strategies never get implemented, but explaining these failures, or rather the causative factors, is a little more complicated. Possible culprits for failure could be: lack of a systematic approach, mistaken assumptions on the strategy, an overestimation of the company's abilities to implement, miscommunication within the company, failure to keep the strategy up to date or strategy implementers losing touch after implementation has begun.
In Executing Your Strategy, Morgan, Levitt and Malek detail the ways business executives should always action their carefully compiled strategies to achieve effective and desired results. The authors spent many years honing project management best-practices through delivering various methodologies with the company Integrated Project Systems in the late 1990s. In 2004, they decided to bring their expertise together and distil the 'message' from their observations. Executing Your Strategy brings together the author's ideas arising from eight years of research of best strategic practices. With company examples and practical advice, the book presents its ideas within a clear and simple framework for executing successful business strategy.
The book outlines six crucial factors for strategy success which implementers must continually assess in order to stay focused and get their strategy right:
- Ideation: Clarify and communicate company identity and mission.
- Vision: Transform the company's identity into clear and achievable goals.
- Nature: A framework for aligning company strategy, culture and structure.
- Engagement: Choose the right projects through effective portfolio management.
- Synthesis: Manage projects effectively by utilising resources to maximize strategic benefits.
- Transition: Successfully move projects to the business focus to realise their strategic potential.
The book is aimed at both strategy developers and strategy implementers - different sections will be relevant to managers at different levels. Senior strategists will benefit from the early chapters, which focus on long range vision and company identity, whilst implementers such as project managers will benefit from the latter chapters focusing on strategy execution. At all levels and in all organisations, managers will welcome this holistic approach to strategy which reinforces the role that every executive plays in successful strategic alignment.
