Your great strategy requires great execution

Every enterprise has a bold strategy and urgency to execute it.

But their current process to achieve the strategy is inefficient and expensive.

Strategy execution isn’t part of the business. It is the business.

Subpar strategy execution is the result of:

Shallow Alignment
Limited Accountability
Lack of Focus

Shallow Alignment

According to MIT Sloan, only 22%of senior executives and 13% of frontline managers can name the company’s strategic priorities. Alignment rapidly decays from L4 and onward — precisely where 99% of the company’s execution capacity is concentrated.

What does shallow alignment look like?

  • Executives measure outcomes and results while everyone else tracks output and activity; no one knows how it adds up.
  • Teams operate in functional silos and cross-functional teaming is rare.
  • Leadership is aligned at the top, but surveys show 40% of employees don't know the strategy or how to contribute.
  • People guess where to focus time and resources, and wasted or duplicative work abounds.

Learn how an Outcome Mindset fosters strategic alignment

Cisco

“We were aligned on the strategy on the page, but we weren’t aligned on the execution. You have to focus on making 1% progress everyday. But if you don’t align, you all end up moving 1% everyday in random directions.”

Gee Rittenhouse
Chief Executive Officer, Skyhigh Security

Limited Accountability & Visibility

Aligning on outcomes without driving accountability for those outcomes is all pain, no gain — we don't want to document the objective and results, we want to achieve them. Accountability without alignment is even more painful and even less productive: 80-page business review decks and meetings that consume hundreds of hours without surfacing the most critical risks or driving the most important conversations; debates on whether the plan is the plan and the actuals are the actuals, scorecards that are tedious theater rather than headlights that enable fast, data-driven decisions. Focus drives results and frequent focus drives significantly better results in highly dynamic markets; business reviews and weekly meetings should focus attention and reduce strategy execution risks as fast as possible.

What does low accountability look like?

  • Missing forecasts and promises.
  • Everyone's busy but the company isn't doing well.
  • Meeting milestones is confused with creating outcomes.
  • Watermelon Metrics look good, but are indirection or misdirection at best.
  • Preparing for business reviews takes 40+ hours to produce 50-page slide decks with data that is wrong by the time you get to the meeting.
  • Strategic priorities are defined at the beginning of a quarter, but rarely discussed during Business Reviews or adjusted based on progress to plan.

Learn why alignment and accountability are your most powerful growth levers.

GHX

“Our Monthly Operating Committee was a four-hour stoplight status conversation. We lacked accountability and a common definition of success. The cost of this meeting was $50,000 every month. So we asked, are we getting $50k worth of value out of this? Absolutely not.”

Ryan Padilla
Head of Strategy Operations, GHX

Lack of Focus on What Matters Most

When people don’t know the strategy or how to contribute to it, they have no choice but to guess where to focus time and resources. It's this guesswork — and the absence of clarity and alignment on outcomes — that makes it impossible to effectively determine priorities. When you hear “we have too many priorities” what you're really hearing is “we don't have enough clarity on what outcomes are important to the business right now." This creates decision paralysis and poor guesses substituting for strategic direction. Few companies can afford this lost momentum and the wasted resources. To thrive, companies must mobilize this lost capacity on the most important strategic priorities.

What does a lack of focus look like?

  • You hear “there are too many priorities” frequently from many parts of the org.
  • Decisions are delegated upward in the organization.
  • People are task driven but can't identify the outcome their tasks should create.
  • It’s impossible to measure the impact of a team's contribution to strategy achievement.
  • Teams set and forget OKRs so they never drive week to week choices.
  • OKRs have end-of-period “taillight” measures and milestone completion, so they don't serve their purpose of focusing attention on outcomes.

Hear why focus is the key to great results

AstraZeneca

“It's not about these activities and those initiatives and how many projects you have simultaneously. But can you ruthlessly prioritize to the point of impact and do those things that are most impactful rather than just keeping you busy.”

Cindy Hoots
CIDO, AstraZeneca

Make Strategy Execution your most digital and reliable process

Alignment

across the org

Increase execution
capacity 25%

Accountability

for outcomes

Lower overhead by
15% or more

Focus

time and effort

Execute strategy
30% faster

Learn More