The Execution Challenge

Foreword

The late Stephen Covey once said, “Most leaders would agree that they'd be better off having an average strategy with superb execution than a superb strategy with poor execution.” Similarly, noted authority Michael Porter observed that more than 80 percent of organizations do not successfully execute their business strategies and that in 70 percent of these cases, the reason was not the strategy itself but bad execution.

In my four-plus decades of work as a professor of strategic leadership and an active consultant to organizations around the world, I can attest to both sets of observations. I have experienced first-hand that it is far easier for organizations to create a strategy than it is for them to implement it.

Even in business schools, we teach courses on strategy formulation and courses on strategy implementation/execution, but typically they are separate courses, with the latter being more focused on leadership and change as opposed to devising an architecture to make a strategy real, implementable, and measurable. That architecture for implementation has long been a missing link in the field of strategy.

I first met Brian Cameron more than 30 years ago when I was Associate Dean for Executive Education at the Smeal College of Business at Penn State. Brian became a valued member of our staff and helped us to incorporate newly developing technologies into our management processes. We stayed in touch as his career unfolded, and I followed his work as it evolved ...