One of the biggest problems I’ve noted in strategy is not formulation, but implementation. Companies develop a great strategy and then fail to communicate it or aren’t sufficiently aggressive in pursuing it. Here is a checklist to assess the implementation of your strategy:
1. Have the intent, mission, vision and strategy been communicated throughout the company?
2. Have clear objectives and responsibilities been assigned all up and down the organization so everyone knows what their tasks are within the new strategy?
3. Have leaders and managers with key responsibilities conducted their mission analysis to properly determine their distinctive roles and missions within the company? For more information about mission analysis, see the following article or pages 91 to 101 of my book, Brilliant Manoeuvres: How to Use Military Wisdom to Win Business Battles.
4. Has a full implementation plan with milestones and metrics been created at all levels of the organization? Have key executives and managers’ terms of reference and the performance review process been suitably modified to incorporate these?
5. Is there a communication plan in place to inform all employees, suppliers, distributors, clients, and investors, and have you assessed the initial impacts on them?
6. Are your organizational structure, processes, and systems well aligned with the new strategy and goals? What measures and plans do you have to assess and modify these as you implement the strategy?
7. Do all of your people, especially executives and managers, have the requisite skills to do the planning and operations to execute on this strategy? Do you have the intention to provide this?
8. Do you have a regular review process in place with weekly/bi-weekly (if needed), monthly, quarterly meetings?
9. Have you conducted a quarterly after action review to assess progress and, more important, to identify lessons learned as you make the planned changes?
10. What are you and your leadership team doing to adjust the strategic execution as you implement the strategy?
11. How are your customers reacting to the changes? Are they enthusiastic, blasé, engaged and willing to help, hindering?
12. How is your entire company and management team reacting? Are they fully engaged and onside, or are there areas where they don’t want to cooperate or get on board?
13. Are there key executives or managers who need specific coaching to help them raise their performance in line with their goals and missions?
14. Have you estimated and assessed your competitors’ reactions? Have you considered how you can shape the competitive landscape to your advantage?
15. What plans do you have in place to look at the next 6 months, 12 months, and 18 months and beyond?
Speed and agility are essential in business for both offence and defence. Offensively, speed and agility allow us to recognize opportunities quickly in order to seize the initiative, and to act before the competition does. Defensively, speed and agility enable us to react adequately to competitive threats, before competitors can exploit them, in order to protect existing positions. Speed and agility are applicable at all business levels, strategic, operational, and tactical. The following table gives some examples of these applications.
Offensive Applications
Strategic
• Don’t dither over experiments that show promise; decide quickly to reinforce them.
• Reallocate assets and capital quickly and efficiently to high potential areas.
Operational
• Ensure all managers and employees fully understand the strategy and intent, and empower them to formulate their own missions within the wider mandate.
• Create processes and systems that empower and enable rapid and repeatable tactical decisions and outcomes.
Tactical
• Salespeople qualify leads quickly and efficiently so they focus on high potential prospects.
• Create client proposals quickly and efficiently once conceptual agreement has been reached.
Defensive Applications
Strategic
• Decide quickly on whether to imitate or simply monitor a competitor’s new product.
• Imitate success; don’t reinvent the wheel; reverse engineer competing products and services.
Operational
• Divest from severely underperforming businesses and failed experiments quickly and without fuss.
• Implement changes and new systems and processes quickly to avoid resistance and dithering.
Tactical
• Customer service agents are empowered to respond and correct reasonable complaints.
• Errors are corrected quickly and without fuss once the decision is made to make them right.
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