Welcome to the new i-nexus blog.
Whilst there may be many detours into other interesting challenges and ideas along the way, I intend in this blog to share my thoughts on a subject close to my heart and at the heart of the i-nexus mission i.e. what organisations can do to increase the probability of successfully executing the strategy they have crafted and deliver on the promises they have inevitably made to stakeholders e.g. shareholders.
In this first post, I want to reflect on why I think strategy execution is so hard and why so many organisations struggle with it. Fundamentally, it think the challenge is multi-dimensional. It is not simply the logistical complexity inherent in trying to identify and coordinate the many thousands of things that need to be done to execute what can be a few key bullet points on a CEO's PowerPoint. It also includes the need to align hearts and minds of the many thousands of people who need to make this happen and the ability to be able to change the plan, based on changes in the environment and progress/lack of progress in implementation in real-time as you go along. To add to this complexity, when we are executing strtaegy typically we are trying to change what the organisation does while we continue to run the operation we have today. This is like trying to rebuild a plane, at 30,000ft while its flying along. When you think about it this way its not hard to understand why all of the research says 90% organisations are failing to execute their strategy, whilst the same research is reporting that successful strategy execution is the top of most CEO's agendas.
Whilst clearly strategy execution is not easy ... I'm convinced that we can do much more effectively than we do today. More on this later....
