Making Strategy "Happen"

By John A. Haas
Management Strategies Group

Enlightened companies spend time carefully crafting their Mission Statement. It can help focus vision, and answer the questions: "Why are we in business" and "What are we striving to ultimately achieve?" It's a useful framework for considering options, business planning and decision making.

Linking Strategy to Structure and Action

Once strategic objectives have been identified, the challenge is to create an organization structure and behaviors that maximize chances of achieving those objectives. It's amazing how often this analysis is overlooked; how often companies just assume that the current organization will continue to work just fine, even though goals have changed.

Questions should include:

• Are job responsibilities clear; do they encourage appropriate individual and team effort?
• Are individual performance goals are consistent with each other and especially "corporate" goals?
• Are needed resources brought together and empowered to focus on results and determine the best paths to follow within defined resource parameters?
• Can we tell if we're on track?  Do we have success criteria and reporting systems in place?

Case I: A Waste Management Company

We scheduled a management "advance" (they refuse to "retreat!") to examine goals and resource requirements to achieve them. The critical priorities were operating efficiency; increasing total revenues; and one division's profitability.

Three groups were created, which excluded the executive closest to the problem, to identify "20 crazy ways to..." Results were given to cross-functional project teams consisting of the "right" people, who refined the ideas into creative, energizing action initiatives.

Case II: A Software Company

The CEO/founder recognized his technical strengths and management limitations. He hired a COO to keep the company market-focused and properly organized to support both current business and growth opportunities.

The COO quickly observed independent functional "islands of excellence."

The agenda of an off-site management team meeting included clarifying the firm's mission and strategic objectives; critically examining its current operating style and culture; and creating cross-functional task teams to identify practices impeding and enabling goal achievement, and develop solutions. The group reconvened a month later, to decide on needed structure and process improvements.

The common denominator in these and countless other examples, is that the right people were given time and space to critically examine current operations in relation to future needs, and to envision and implement improvements.

Volume 8, Number 1