The Execution Challenge

Chapter 1Strategy Development, Alignment, and Execution

Most organizations have a business strategy—some good, some that could be improved. In their book The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action,¹ authors Robert Kaplan and David Norton note that 90 percent of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully. They go on to state that the reason for this failure is often not the strategy itself, but bad execution. According to Kaplan and Norton, this failure to execute strategy is one of the most significant management challenges facing public and private organizations in the twenty-first century.

In their 2000 book, The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment,² Robert Kaplan and David Norton report that a mere 7 percent of employees fully understand their company's business strategies and what's expected of them in order to help achieve company goals. While this data has been around for a while, our experience suggests that it still rings true today. Furthermore, in most industries, strategy is not static and is tweaked as conditions on the ground change—no plan survives contact with the enemy. This is particularly true today, as the rate of change has accelerated in most organizations and industries.

How can we hope to successfully execute something that is changing and that a very low percentage of people fully understand? This question is at the heart of the problem—organizations today, ...