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| Executing Your Strategy: How to Break It Down and Get It Done | 
 enlarge | Authors: William A. Malek, Mark Morgan, Raymond Elliot Levitt
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $16.93
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (17 reviews)
Sales Rank: 23648
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 1591399564
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4012
EAN: 9781591399568
ASIN: 1591399564
Publication Date: January 7, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Why do businesses consistently fail to execute their competitive strategies? Because leaders don't identify and invest in the full range of projects and programs required to align the organization with its strategy. Moreover, even when strategy makers do break their plans down into doable chunks, they seldom work with project leaders to prioritize strategic investments and assure that needed resources are applied in priority order. And they often neglect to revise the strategic portfolio to fit the demands of a dynamic environment, or to stay connected to strategic projects through completion, as new products, services, skills and capabilities are transferred into operations.
In Executing Your Strategy, Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt, and William Malek present six imperatives that enable you to do the right strategic projects--and do those projects right. And it is no accident that the six imperatives combine to create the acronym INVEST:
Ideation: Clarify and communicate Purpose, Identity and Long Range Intention
Nature: Develop alignment between Strategy, Structure and Culture based on Ideation
Vision: Create clear Goals and Metrics aligned to Strategy and guided by Ideation
Engagement: Do the right projects based on the Strategy through Portfolio management
Synthesis: Do Projects and Programs right, in alignment with Portfolio
Transition: Move the Project and Program outputs into Operations where benefit is realized
Full of intriguing company examples and practical advice, this crucial new resource shows you how to make strategy happen in your organization
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 Perils and opportunities in the six domains of the strategic execution network August 20, 2008
In this volume, Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt, and William Malek focus their attention on "engaging in strategic project portfolio management for successful execution" and more specifically on the six domains of the strategic execution network, their acronym INVEST: Ideation (clarify and communicate purpose, identity and long- range intention), Nature (develop alignment between and among strategy, structure, and culture based on ideation), Vision (create clear goals and metrics aligned to strategy and guided by ideation), Engagement (engage the strategy via the investment stream), Synthesis (do projects and programs right, in alignment with portfolio), and Transition (transfer the projects and program outputs into operations where their benefits can be realized). Morgan, Levitt, and Malek devote a separate chapter to each. In the final chapter, they respond to a question their reader has no doubt by then asked: "Where should we start?" Although much (if not most) of this material examines strategy execution in an organization, the authors use Lance Armstrong as an example of how an individual can also "align all the [strategy-making] domains and invest every precious minute, and every personal resource, accordingly."
I was especially interested in the material provided in Chapter Three as the authors examine how to align an organization's culture and structure with its strategy. This is precisely the approach Louis Gerstner took after be assumed his duties as CEO of IBM. His mindset could be described as "outside-in" as he carefully determined how to achieve a strategic fit with IBM's external environment and then redefined his company's "nature." That is, he ensured that strategy, structure, and culture in the nature domain were in proper alignment with the ideation and vision domains. That is why IBM, previously a maker of branded products, redefined its "nature" to be that of a provider of custom integrated IT solutions for its global clients.
Morgan, Levitt, and Malek note that, in contrast, many strategists "focus on designing strategies that fit the external environment. They underestimate, as [Carly] Fiorina and the HP board appear to have done, the equally important issue of strategic fit with the internal environment. As [Mark] Hurd's early results revealed, the idea of combining with Compaq was not inherently flawed but misaligned with the nature of HP - its DNA as Gerstner would put it." I presume to add that, to a lesser extent, the same challenges await those companies that are considering a strategic alliance.
In the same chapter, they also examine four generic types of culture and agree with William Schneider (author of The Reengineering Alternative: A Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work) that in each of the four, its members share a dominant value. For example, "A competence culture believes in the `Field of Dreams' principle: make great products and people will flock to buy them. It values technical values above all else." The other types of culture are Collaboration (understanding the unique needs of customers), Cultivation (recruiting, retaining, and nurturing creative employees to produce unique products), and Control (low cost production of standard outputs).
Readers will appreciate the authors' skillful use of dozens of Tables and Figures throughout their lively narrative that consolidate key points. In Chapter 3, for example, the Tables illustrate "The four archetypes of organizational culture" (Page 101), Measure your organization's culture" (Page 135), "Measure you organization's structure" (Page 136), and "Measure your organization's strategy within the nature domain" (Page 137). In the same chapter, these are the Figures: "The nature imperative: Invest in projects to align culture, structure, and strategy" (Page 94), Align strategy with culture: Charting your culture egg" (Page 101), "The culture egg for a custom manufacturer" (Page 102), "Template for testing the alignment of strategy and culture" (Page 103), "HP's strategy-culture alignment map" (Page 103), "Formal matrix combines functional excellence with product/program focus" (Page 113), "Identify the apprriate alignment of strategy, structure, and culture" (Page 115), and "Achieving the nature imperative at DPR [Construction]: Aligning strategy, structure, and culture required careful ongoing investments" (Page 133). The other five chapters have equally informative Tables and Figures; also additional real-world examples of how some companies successfully executed strategies and other companies tried but failed to do so.
In the final chapter, the authors reiterate six imperatives of strategic execution (first displayed by Table 1.1 on Page 17 and then duplicated by Table C-1, Page 241), cite several real-world examples (e.g. Airbus and the perils of misalignment), discuss Lance Armstrong and the lessons to be learned from his successful execution of various strategies, and then pose what they call six "Acid Test Questions (on Pages 256-257) that could be read first, before proceeding through the Introduction and the six chapters. I wish I had done so because they provide an especially valuable frame of refernce for the wealth of information, insights, and recommendations that Morgan, Levitt, and Malek provide.
Their book is a brilliant achivement.
* * * * *
Those who share my high regard for it are urged to check out Schneider's aforementioned book as well as Lawrence Hrebiniak's Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change and Doing What Matters: How to Get Results That Make a Difference - The Revolutionary Old-School Approach co-authored by James Kilt with John Manfredi and Robert Lorder. Also A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan's The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis' Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson.
 Read it if you want to get confused on strategy, implement it if you want to sink your company August 2, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I must confess, even if you have the above intentions, you will need a lot of patience to read this book. One of the most eclectic, boring, dull and terribly academic books on the subject. The authors obviously are new to the subject of strategy that they hardly know the area. What they have obviously done was to cut and paste their expertise on project management on the topic of strategy and claim that they came up with a strategy formulation and execution methodology. Nonsense. It is a complete mess. It not only lacks in depth knowledge about strategy, but also very poor on coherence. It is just a meaningless patchwork. God save you, but if you make the mistake of implementing what is preached here, be sure that your organization will turn into a big mess and bankruptcy will be imminent. Avoid it at all costs.
Terrible! July 12, 2008
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
It's hard to get positive about a management book that begins with a ridiculous quote: "There may be a thousand little choices in a day. All of them count." Ever hear of Pareto's Law?
The first paragraph then tells us that "The spectacular flameouts of Carly Fiorina at HP, John Akers at IBM, John Sculley at Apple, and Pehr Gyllenhammar at Volvo are merely a few high-profile examples among thousands of CEOs whose strategies fail every year because of poor execution."
But it's just not true. Gyllenhammar failed because his strategy (make factory jobs less repetitious, and more interesting) created higher costs and lower quality - especially vs. the Toyota Production System. Carly Fiorina failed partly because of her abrasive personality, poor focus (her management meetings were dreaded), and lack of a quantitative approach, but mostly because her focus on creating a single sales force created poor performance, reduced accountability, and high costs; similarly, keeping the PC and printer units together allowed the latter to cover up the former's weaknesses. John Akers made three enormous strategic errors - failing to see the future in manufacturing PCs (allowing Intel to create a commodity market that IBM was unable to add significant value to), allowing Microsoft to take over the market for PC software, and not moving to solidify IBM as an overall problem-solver instead of hardware seller. Finally, John Sculley wanted to destroy Apple's competitive advantage (its easier-to-use software and uniqueness) and become a commodity PC producer selling to large corporations.
Summarizing, "Executing Strategy" makes two unrecoverable blunders in the first half-page, goes on to conclude that "something like 90% of companies consistently fail to execute strategies effectively," and then focuses the next 260 pages on good execution (extremely likely, given its flaunting of Pareto's insights) of what are highly likely to be flawed strategies.
Readers would be much better served reading material that guides deciding what business their company is in (Drucker), determining the relative roles of low costs and high quality, fast new product development (possibly each has a role in differing areas of the company), fast operational change, and how to establish a sustainable competitive advantage.
 Nice addition to the business literature June 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Strategy Execution seems to be the new buzz in making businesses work better. This is good. All that closer to an holistic view of how it all works together seems to be, at least in part, the holy grail of business performance nirvana.
"Executing your Strategy" is a thoughtful and interesting addition to business literature which provides useful insights worth exploring into making business work better. Unfortunately, amidst the insights, it falls into a genre of books which try to generalise from a limited number of examples by generating a business hypothesis / framework which extends beyond the bounds that the data from which it appears to derive can support. There is simply little theoretical depth from which the practicalities of execution can be launched.
Ironically, the weakest parts of the book were the part about "strategy" itself and the part which I thought would be the strongest: the execution side. Given its centrality, I'm still trying to work out how the book actually describes / defines strategy beyond the "strategic path" argument, what goals relate to what long-range intentions, and what relationship these have to "goals" depicted in strategy maps and milestones which drive project plans.
It's probably just me!!
However and alas, the difficulties are not unexpected: a beautiful framework punctuated by some hand-waving argument at critical points which tries to obscure the inherent difficulties of making "strategy" and "strategy execution" practical. The different parts of Strategy Execution Framework (SEF), as described, are not as well aligned as the diagram makes them out to be, although I'm sure that can be improved.
In my younger days, when I didn't know any better and I was looking for something to order my thoughts about this type of stuff, I probably would have given it 4 or 5 stars. But now, for me, as the number of books of this type that I read increases, it simply can't reach the 4 star threshold. It simply doesn't tell me anything fundamentally new. Nevertheless, it is a good try which provides quite a few clues which may, with further exploration, lead to something. For me, again, I suspect moving forward will rely on me NOT reading books of this genre any more. A good blend of theory, craft, insight and experience perhaps is what I need. Time to move on methinks!!
Connects Strategy with Project Management June 23, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
A really good book. It is a pleasure for me to write my opinion about it. Especially the first 3 chapters have opened my eyes. Almost every important aspect is supported by a relative case study.
Finally, the fact that important research and findings of other prestigious authors is used in a beautiful way along with the author's research makes it really a masterpiece. I feel like I have studied 5 different books on the topic.
I certainly recommend it.
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