The Execution Premium

You have your strategy, but can you execute it?

These days, successful companies seem to have a system for everything. From acquiring new customers to managing customer relationships, from quality management to performance measurement, industry leaders have realized that having systematic processes in place reduces risk, prevents oversights, and assures the best chance of delivering results. Yet, despite this insight, most companies still haven't developed a system to manage their most important process: how to develop and execute their strategies.

In The Execution Premium, Robert Kaplan and David Norton show that companies using a formal system for implementing strategy consistently outperform their peers. So why do so many companies still fail to operationalize their strategy? The authors argue that while many of the tools needed for effective strategy deployment already exists, no framework has been developed that links the various strategy implementation elements together.

With books like The Balanced Scorecard and The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed us how an emphasis on strategy can unite an organization and drive increased levels of performance. Now they bring together all their work to create a comprehensive new management system that companies can use to sustain world-class strategy execution. Their six-step process will teach you how to:

• Develop your strategy by clarifying your goals and conducting strategic analysis
• Plan your strategy by selecting theme-based measures, targets, and initiatives, along with accountability for performance
• Align organizational units and employees to your strategy
• Plan operations through priority setting and resource allocation
• Monitor and learn from operations and strategy
• Test and adapt your strategy

To oversee all these processes, the authors introduce the Office of Strategy Management. The OSM serves as a kind of orchestra leader — coordinating activities across functions and business units and keeping everyone synchronized over time. The result is an organization that gains a real execution premium by being able to quickly and reliable execute its strategy.

1. Introduction
2. Develop the Strategy
3. Plan the Strategy
4. Strategic Initiatives: Launching the Strategy into Motion
5. Aligning Organizational Units and Employees
6. Plan Operations: Align Process Improvement Programs
7. Plan Operations: Sales Forecasts, Resource Capacity, and Dynamic Budgets
8. Operational and Strategy Review Meetings
9. Meeting to Test and Adapt the Strategy
10. The Office of Strategy Management

This is an outstanding book! OK, it is not very much new material they present, but the authors manages to add a little here and there and conncect the dots in such a masterly fashion, that I can only stand in awe.

Excellent connections between how to develop a strategy and aligning it with the reality of the company and get it out into the real world.

Highly recommended reading. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this soon was mandatory reading at most MBA-programs around the world.