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March 1 - May 9, 2020
They Follow Through Follow-through is the cornerstone of execution, and every leader who’s good at executing follows through religiously.
Never finish a meeting without clarifying what the follow-through will be, who will do it, when and how they will do it, what resources they will use, and how and when the next review will take place and with whom.
In many organizations, to create the discipline of execution, changes in behavior are needed at even the highest levels.
Strategy Become the premier global provider of XYZ systems to a multiple class of customers. Strategy Milestones
who are below standard in both areas. The Leadership Assessment Summary
SUCCESSION DEPTH AND RETENTION RISK ANALYSIS: Analyzing succession depth and retention risk are the essence of talent planning and building a leadership pipeline of high-potential people.
Get five people who know the person together in a room. Get them to open up, to share and argue their observations, and to reach a conclusion. The diagnosis will come from the convergence of their diverse views. There’s the core of your robust people process.
refer to as baseball cards—one eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, with pictures, compensation, personnel information, and assessments, for every senior executive. Now when we talk about someone, the data is right in front of us, and we’re all talking from the same sheet of paper, with not just a name but degrees, career interests, developmental plans, associations, third-party assessments if we’ve got those things, what his or her current compensation is, what it has been.
This is the social software that makes the system at Duke Energy work. Rolfe ticks off the four elements: “One, a culture of accountability for high performance, which makes you demand the best individuals in your organization. Two, a leader who is not only willing but also ready to question an assessment. Three, a collegial culture among the top executives of the enterprise, where they hold each other mutually accountable to be reasonable and fair and will push back on one another, just as the chairman will push back. And four, giving me, as the head of HR, the right to push too, because I
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Few understand that a good strategic planning process also requires the utmost attention to the hows of executing the strategy.
A contemporary strategic plan must be an action plan that business leaders can rely on to reach their business objectives.
Do you have the right people in place to execute the strategy?
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF A STRATEGY
The substance of any strategy is summed up by its building blocks: the half-dozen or fewer key concepts and actions that define it. Pinpointing the building blocks forces leaders to be clear as they debate and discuss the strategy. It helps them judge whether the strategy is good or bad and why. It provides a basis for exploring alternatives if needed.
If the building blocks are clearly defined, the essence of even the most complex strategy ca...
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Corporate-level strategy is the vehicle for allocating resources among all of the business units.
A corporate strategy also defines the walls of a company—the
A business unit strategy should be less than fifty pages long and should be easy to understand.
Its essence should be describable in one page in terms of its building blocks,
If you can’t describe your strategy in twenty minutes, simply and in plain language...
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LARRY: A good strategic plan is a set of directions you want to take. It’s a roadmap, lightly filled in, so that it gives you plenty of room to maneuver.
Who Builds the Plan? To be effective, a strategy has to be constructed and owned by those who will execute it, namely the line people.
A good strategy process is one of the best devices to teach people about execution.
The strategic plan also contains a short synopsis of the strengths and weaknesses of each major competitor to the business.
A strong strategic plan must address the following questions: What is the assessment of the external environment? How well do you understand the existing customers and markets? What is the best way to grow the business profitably, and what are the obstacles to growth?
Who is the competition? Can the business execute the strategy? Are the short term and long term balanced? What are the important milestones for executing the plan? What are the critical issues facing the business? How will the business make money on a sustainable basis?
What Are the Important Milestones for Executing the Plan?
Milestones bring reality to a strategic plan. If the business doesn’t meet milestones as it executes the plan, leaders have to reconsider whether they’ve got the right strategy after all.
A good strategic plan is adaptable. Once-a-year planning can be dangerous, especially in short-cycle businesses where markets won’t wait on your planning schedule.
Periodic interim reviews can help you to understand what’s happening and what turns in the road are going to be necessary.
Are the Short Term and the Long Term Balanced?
Strategy planning needs to be conducted in real time, connected to shifts in the competitive environment and the business’s own changing strengths and weaknesses.
How to Conduct a Strategy Review
The business unit strategy review is the prime Social Operating Mechanism of the strategy process.
The review should be a creative exercise, not a drill where people regurgitate data.
The strategy review is also a good place for a leader to learn about and develop people.
QUESTIONS TO RAISE AT A STRATEGY REVIEW
How well versed is each business unit team about the competition? How strong is the organizational capability to execute the strategy? Is the plan scattered or sharply focused? Are we choosing the right ideas? Are the linkages with people and operations clear?
How Strong Is the Organizational Capability to Execute the Strategy?
Here’s where a tight and consistent linkage between strategy and people processes becomes critical.
How do you make the right choices? You can get a good idea from how specific, clear, and robust the ideas are. Then you need a lot of dialogue to make sure that even the ideas that sound good make sense. You start by asking four basic questions about each one: Is this idea consistent with the realities of the marketplace? Does it mesh with our organization’s capabilities? Are we pursuing more ideas than we can handle? Will the idea make money?
Are the Linkages with People and Operations Clear?
Achieving everything we’ve talked about so far depends on linking the strategy process to the people and operations processes well. The more you and your people know about all three, the better judgments and trade-offs you can make about how well your strategy meshes with your capabilities, and whether it has a reasonable chance of being profitable.
The linkage between strategy and operations becomes totally transparent when the first few pages of the operating plan (see chapter 9) describe the new strategic direction, the resources required, and the prog...
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The strategy of a business unit clearly lays out how it will reach a new set of customers and ways to get the product qualified in the new segment.
For an operating review, I like to quickly review the strategic plan to see that link has been established. I want the first three pages of the document to be a summary of the strategic plan.
Do your strategic assumptions mesh with your internal yardsticks?
You have to define what you do and don’t want to invest in, and the strategy compilations have to agree with those judgments.
