YOU HAVE A BRILLIANT NEW STRATEGY. NOW IT'S TIME TO EXECUTE.Businesses spend a combined total of $47 billion annually on strategy consulting. Approximately 90 percent of strategic change initiatives fail to deliver theintended results.
Something isn't adding up.
As companies all over the world concentrate on revisiting, revising, and remaking their strategies, they forget the next step: making sure the strategy happens. So it turns out that billions of dollars are spent on brilliant ideas--but not brilliant results.
In this groundbreaking book, business strategy experts Liz Mellon and Simon Carter provide a solution: THE STRATEGY OF EXECUTION. The authors break down the process of ensuring that your new strategy translates into measurable profits and growth into five fundamental andprofoundly important steps:
- MOBILIZE THE VILLAGE: Get your senior executives to embrace the new strategy and actively engage with it.
- GATHER THE ELDERS: Build a small team of the very highest figures in the corporation to lead strategic change.
- POWER UP FEELING: Don't overthink it; trust your instincts as much as your intellect.
- ENERGIZE PEOPLE: Create a culture of communication, ownership, and followthrough of strategic objectives.
- BUILD ENDURANCE: Drive individual and organizational resilience to play the long game and hardwire changethroughout systems and organizational structures to maintain momentum.
In the final chapter, the authors illustrate theirprocess in action through a detailed case study of BPB PLC--a century-old building material company that applied these five steps to make extraordinary strategic change happen.
You can lead positive change in your company. A strategy is just words on paper until it's executed with care and smarts. Use The Strategy of Execution as a blueprint for long-term business success.
There are a lot of smart people coming up with innovative business strategies today. Very few of them, however, are executing them. The gap between strategy and execution has never been wider. The Strategy of Execution provides a practical approach to the work that must be done after a business strategy is agreed upon.
"This is a highly readable guide to one of the most under-researched areas of strategy; execution. Strategists have always had more solutions than there are problems, but the issue of what to do when they leave the building has not been satisfactorily addressed. Liz Mellon andSimon Carter have put together a clear framework for execution illustrated with countless examples. Industry leaders are called ‘executives’ for a reason. This crisp and accessible book should be their mandatory reading." -- PAUL WILLMAN, Professor of Management, London School of Economics
"This is a clearly written and very readable book, with key insights into the challenges of implementinga strategy and good examples from individuals and organizations that have brought about successful change." -- ANDREW HOBDAY, Chief Sustainability Officer, Mars Incorporated
"One aspect of leadership that has always puzzled me is how a leader directs change for the good of the organization and the people. Too often, when a leader talks about change, employees expect the worst. This insightful book lays out a step-by-step guide on how to execute a strategy with warmth and conviction, bringing people with you rather than dragging them, fearful, behind you." -- KEVIN KELLY, former CEO, Heidrick & Struggles
Table of Contents:
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
Companies Spend Billions on Strategy 1
Five Steps to Execution 4
1 Mobilize the Village 7
Cisco Gets It 7
The Shifting Problem 11
The Village 13
Getting the Village Moving 24
Summary 35
2 Gather the Elders 37
Whatever Happened at Nokia? 37
The Elders 40
The Gamification of Leadership 44
Building Wise Elders 53
Good Governance 64
Summary 68
3 Power Up Feeling 71
Aristotle and Euripides 71
Thinking Gets in the Way 74
Trust Your Instinct 75
Brush Up Your EQ 81
A New Skill Set for Execution 86
Purpose and Passion 93
Summary 101
4 Energize People 103
The Swanborough Tump 103
Connecting for a Culture of Execution 108
Getting Ownership 116
Follow-Through 125
Summary 136
5 Build Endurance 139
Strategy Has Become a Sprint 140
Marathon Endurance 142
Running the Strategy Execution Marathon 144
Endurance Is a Formula 149
Organizational Endurance 163
Summary 170
6 Five Steps to Strategy Execution 173
Pulling It All Together 173
Self-Assessment Guide 183
Notes 187
Index 201
About the Author :
DR. LIZ MELLON has spent the last 25 years
designing, developing, and delivering leadership development programs, initially as a professor at London Business School and currently as executive director at Duke CE, the world's leading executive education provider. The world's most influential global ranking of management
thought leaders, Thinkers50, has listed Mellon
on its "Guru Radar."
SIMON CARTER, former CEO of Baxi Heating UK, was featured by the BBC for his work in leading corporate transformation during a period of challenging union dominance in the 1990s. Since stepping down as chairman, Carter has been an advisor to FTSE companies all over the world.
