Jagabee

Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance

7 basic rules for setting and delivering strategy:
Keep it simple, make it concrete.
Avoid long, drawn-out descriptions of lofty goals and instead stick to clear language describing what your company will and won’t do.
Debate assumptions, not forecasts.
Create cross-functional teams drawn from strategy, marketing, and finance to ensure the assumptions underlying your long-term plans reflect both the real economics of your company’s markets and its actual performance relative to competitors.
Use a rigorous analytic framework.
Ensure that the dialogue between the corporate center and the business units about market trends and assumptions is conducted within a rigorous framework, such as that of “profit pools.”
Discuss resource deployments early.
Create more realistic forecasts and more executable plans by discussing up front the level and timing of critical deployments.
Clearly identify priorities.
Prioritize tactics so that employees have a clear sense of where to direct their efforts.
Continuously monitor performance.
Track resource deployment and results against plan, using continuous feedback to reset assumptions and reallocate resources.
Reward and develop execution capabilities.
Motivate and develop staff.
Following these rules strictly can help narrow the strategy-to-performance gap.

The Strategy Process: Making the Link with People and Operations

The strategy process defines where a business wants to go, and the people process defines who will get it there. The operating plan provides the path for those people, breaking long-term output into short-term targets.

Where the Performance Goes [Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance]

This chart shows the average performance loss implied by the importance ratings that managers in our survey gave to specific breakdowns in the planning and execution process.