Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution And Change

by Lawrence G. Hrebiniak

In this book, Larry Hrebiniak offers a comprehensive, disciplined process model for making strategy work in the real world. Hrebiniak shows why execution is even more important than many senior executives realize, and sheds powerful new light on why businesses fail to deliver on even their most promising strategies. He offers a systematic roadmap for execution that encompasses every key success factor: organizational structure, coordination, information sharing, incentives, controls, change, management, culture, and the role of power and influence in the execution process.
Making Strategy Work concludes with a start-to-finish case study showing how to use Hrebiniak's ideas to address one of today's most difficult business execution challenges: ensuring the success of a merger on acquisition. The advice on making M&A strategies work justifies the addition of this book to any execution tookit.

Genres: Business, Management, Leadership, Nonfiction

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Marks54 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about strategy implementation by a longtime professor at Wharton. It is actually an update and revision of a 2005 version of the book to include some additional chapters on applications to service businesses, global corporations, and professional service firms. This work in turn, is an updating and revision of some work he did with William Joyce of Dartmouth in the 1980s. So he has been working these ideas around for a while.

The expository mode is common to most of the books in this genre. Some conceptual frameworks are developed around some knotty problem that firms face. How do we get everyone to go along with a big reorganization? How do we apply in Indonesia the strategy that has served us so well in Cleveland? Why is it that acquisitions always seem to take longer to complete and cost more than we anticipated? You get the idea -- the stuff that keeps some managers up at night? Each chapter or two has its own framework. There are about a dozen chapters (13 here) which makes it convenient to assign a chapter a week on a class. These works are always high on readability and low on syllables and there are copious examples to the experiences of major firms, which the author has worked or consulted for -- to boost credibility.

The positives -- there are some good ideas that are presented in a coherent manner and that link together into some broad frameworks. The story is generally a sound one and the book is relatively free of gimmicks and fads. This is bordering on "the accepted wisdom". The writing is fairly clear and the work does not seem as pompous as its cousins up at Harvard. The book is also well formatted for airplane reading and skimming, with lots of summary sections and recapitulations.

The negatives -- if you follow this literature, there is not much new going on here. It is good that the material seems reasonable, but it has seemed reasonable for a while. Some additional thinking and perhaps some new ideas may be in order? There is an additional concern to note for those not familiar with this work. The best interactions by consultants and gurus happen when they work with specific firms around specific problems and changes. The trouble with that is that the client firms don't like to have the juicy details of past jobs presented and dissected in business trade books. Concerns about proprietary information are reasonable. In addition, nobody wants to be associated with a fascinating case study of a failed strategy. As a result, general audience treatments of top management cases tend to sound generic and thin on the details. You often have to read between the lines and do some homework to get what is going on. In particular for this book, the examples are not very detailed, even for the genre.

The update chapters are also not particularly helpful and convey relatively little to those with much background on the topics.

Overall, the book is OK. It has some insights for specialists but may prove confusing to more general readers.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read all the chapters my Professor assigned to me so I think that counts as finishing the book ;)
I think we only skipped 3 out of the 12 chapters anyway

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very educational and down to earth reading. It's a must after reading Bossidy and Ram Charan's Book (Execution). I enjoyed chapter 6, about control (feedback - performance reviews) and incentives.

[Jaclyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hrebiniak's work was, as I understand it, novel at the time of its publication: emphasizing the importance of execution in addition to strategy-making. While it may no longer be a buzzworthy topic among business writers or business schools, it was still an interesting read, especially given where my organization is in its lifecycle. Some of Hrebiniak's diagrams were particularly valuable, notably the culture change management diagram from Chapter 8. I also enjoyed his discussion of the various change management strategies. Three stars because I found it to be a bit too repetitive; the voice left much to be desired. Overall, there are worthwhile excerpts in here, especially for new managers who are being passed the torch of visioning/strategy-making, without being told of the importance of execution and implementation.

[Bob Gao · Rating 5 out of 5]

After joining the company recent strategy planning and witnessing the last few years' poor execution journey, I red this book trying to search what does good execution look like and how to organize to achieve it.

I do get a thorough and comprehensive answer from this book. This book becomes my first bible in strategy execution.

Key elements of successful execution

- good strategy comes first
- organizational structure and execution
- managing integration . Effective coordination and information sharing, RACI model
-incentives and control: support in hand reinforcing execution
- managing change, culture change
-power, influence, and execution

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not enough to give orders, if a leader is not connected to the workforce then it is very difficult to realize the fulfillment of strategic vision. This really put the dysfunction of my company in sharp focus and I realize that there is no commitment to quality improvement other than lip service. The mad scramble is to make money and execution is secondary.

[Anna Epishcheva · Rating 2 out of 5]

May be I'm not enough strategical for that book, I found it very repetitive inside itself / repeated several times in HBR articles (which are using excerpts from this book of course, but I red them first)

[Camilla Garnand · Rating 4 out of 5]

good strategy book but it seems to repeat practices and theory over and over again.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing too enlightening