Traditionally, businesses have viewed strategy and its execution as two different aspects. Most business leaders have been pigeonholed into either the ‘visionary’ or ‘operator’types. However, this has led to certain problems as attested the strategy arm of business consulting behemoth PwC’s study that says that less than a tenth of the leaders are good at both strategy and its execution. The ideal leader though is one like Starbucks’s Howard Schultz. He had a certain vision for how Starbucks stores ought to be perceived by the people, but ensured that by regularly communicating to the personnel and investing in them, even during die situations such as the global financial crisis. So more than the independent parts of strategy and execution, it is the combined part that truly builds the organization, and for that three steps are needed to be fulfilled. First of all, the corporate strategy needs to be designed keeping in mind the value to be added to customers’ lives, specific capabilities helping them excel or how to react during disruption. After this, due diligence has to be paid to convert the lofty ideas into practices to be followed on everyday basis. The last hurdle of executing the strategy has to be done through important levers along the way. Employees must be able to deal with cross-functional challenges, be able to scale up operations and be able to leverage their innate capabilities.

Source:https://hbr.org/2017/11/how-to-excel-at-both-strategy-and-execution

Uploaded Date:23 November 2017