Executing Your Strategy: How to Break It Down and Get It Done | 
 enlarge | Authors: Mark Morgan, Raymond Elliot Levitt, William Malek
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 6863
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 1591399564
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4012
EAN: 9781591399568
ASIN: 1591399564
Publication Date: January 7, 2008
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Product Description
Why do businesses consistently fail to execute their competitive strategies? Because leaders don't identify and invest in the full range of projects and programs required to align the organization with its strategy. Moreover, even when strategy makers do break their plans down into doable chunks, they seldom work with project leaders to prioritize strategic investments and assure that needed resources are applied in priority order. And they often neglect to revise the strategic portfolio to fit the demands of a dynamic environment, or to stay connected to strategic projects through completion, as new products, services, skills and capabilities are transferred into operations.
In Executing Your Strategy, Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt, and William Malek present six imperatives that enable you to do the right strategic projects--and do those projects right. And it is no accident that the six imperatives combine to create the acronym INVEST:
Ideation: Clarify and communicate Purpose, Identity and Long Range Intention
Nature: Develop alignment between Strategy, Structure and Culture based on Ideation
Vision: Create clear Goals and Metrics aligned to Strategy and guided by Ideation
Engagement: Do the right projects based on the Strategy through Portfolio management
Synthesis: Do Projects and Programs right, in alignment with Portfolio
Transition: Move the Project and Program outputs into Operations where benefit is realized
Full of intriguing company examples and practical advice, this crucial new resource shows you how to make strategy happen in your organization
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Terrible! July 12, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
It's hard to get positive about a management book that begins with a ridiculous quote: "There may be a thousand little choices in a day. All of them count." Ever hear of Pareto's Law?
The first paragraph then tells us that "The spectacular flameouts of Carly Fiorina at HP, John Akers at IBM, John Sculley at Apple, and Pehr Gyllenhammar at Volvo are merely a few high-profile examples among thousands of CEOs whose strategies fail every year because of poor execution."
But it's just not true. Gyllenhammar failed because his strategy (make factory jobs less repetitious, and more interesting) created higher costs and lower quality - especially vs. the Toyota Production System. Carly Fiorina failed partly because of her abrasive personality, poor focus (her management meetings were dreaded), and lack of a quantitative approach, but mostly because her focus on creating a single sales force created poor performance, reduced accountability, and high costs; similarly, keeping the PC and printer units together allowed the latter to cover up the former's weaknesses. John Akers made three enormous strategic errors - failing to see the future in manufacturing PCs (allowing Intel to create a commodity market that IBM was unable to add significant value to), allowing Microsoft to take over the market for PC software, and not moving to solidify IBM as an overall problem-solver instead of hardware seller. Finally, John Sculley wanted to destroy Apple's competitive advantage (its easier-to-use software and uniqueness) and become a commodity PC producer selling to large corporations.
Summarizing, "Executing Strategy" makes two unrecoverable blunders in the first half-page, goes on to conclude that "something like 90% of companies consistently fail to execute strategies effectively," and then focuses the next 260 pages on good execution (extremely likely, given its flaunting of Pareto's insights) of what are highly likely to be flawed strategies.
Readers would be much better served reading material that guides deciding what business their company is in (Drucker), determining the relative roles of low costs and high quality, fast new product development (possibly each has a role in differing areas of the company), fast operational change, and how to establish a sustainable competitive advantage.
 Nice addition to the business literature June 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Strategy Execution seems to be the new buzz in making businesses work better. This is good. All that closer to an holistic view of how it all works together seems to be, at least in part, the holy grail of business performance nirvana.
"Executing your Strategy" is a thoughtful and interesting addition to business literature which provides useful insights worth exploring into making business work better. Unfortunately, amidst the insights, it falls into a genre of books which try to generalise from a limited number of examples by generating a business hypothesis / framework which extends beyond the bounds that the data from which it appears to derive can support. There is simply little theoretical depth from which the practicalities of execution can be launched.
Ironically, the weakest parts of the book were the part about "strategy" itself and the part which I thought would be the strongest: the execution side. Given its centrality, I'm still trying to work out how the book actually describes / defines strategy beyond the "strategic path" argument, what goals relate to what long-range intentions, and what relationship these have to "goals" depicted in strategy maps and milestones which drive project plans.
It's probably just me!!
However and alas, the difficulties are not unexpected: a beautiful framework punctuated by some hand-waving argument at critical points which tries to obscure the inherent difficulties of making "strategy" and "strategy execution" practical. The different parts of Strategy Execution Framework (SEF), as described, are not as well aligned as the diagram makes them out to be, although I'm sure that can be improved.
In my younger days, when I didn't know any better and I was looking for something to order my thoughts about this type of stuff, I probably would have given it 4 or 5 stars. But now, for me, as the number of books of this type that I read increases, it simply can't reach the 4 star threshold. It simply doesn't tell me anything fundamentally new. Nevertheless, it is a good try which provides quite a few clues which may, with further exploration, lead to something. For me, again, I suspect moving forward will rely on me NOT reading books of this genre any more. A good blend of theory, craft, insight and experience perhaps is what I need. Time to move on methinks!!
 Connects Strategy with Project Management June 23, 2008
A really good book. It is a pleasure for me to write my opinion about it. Especially the first 3 chapters have opened my eyes. Almost every important aspect is supported by a relative case study.
Finally, the fact that important research and findings of other prestigious authors is used in a beautiful way along with the author's research makes it really a masterpiece. I feel like I have studied 5 different books on the topic.
I certainly recommend it.
What Project Management is Important, How can this be? June 16, 2008
I love this book. The Executives make a decision and then stand back and hope it gets implemented. Everything must be tied together. This book goes through how to Execute Strategy all the way through the organization. Break it down and get it done!
 Too academic to be useful June 2, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I had high hopes for this book but ended up returning it after getting a look at the table of contents and flipped through the book. The title itself is a bit misleading in that I expected a high energy 'let's tackle some big problems' kind of attitude. Instead, the text is dry and laborious. I'm much happier with two other books: Back of the Napkin and Making Things Happen. They will get you where you need to go.
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