Practicing Organization Development: A Guide for Leading Change: A Third Edition

SILENT BARRIERS TO STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION

What prevents organizations from aligning their organization with strategy? In the last twenty years, Russell Eisenstat and I have asked dozens of senior teams at the corporate, business unit, and operating level to appoint task forces of managers one to two levels below them. These task forces interviewed one hundred key people across all major parts of the organizations (functional departments, regions, and businesses, depending on the scale and scope of the organization) and asked them whether a strategic statement drafted by their senior team made sense and what organizational strengths and barriers would help or hinder strategy implementation. An analysis of what these task forces found revealed ...