Strategy Execution is Like Gymnastics: You Have To Stick the Landing

Companies spend significant time and resources developing new strategies and initiatives at all levels of their organizations to support their growth and expansion plans. Yet, frequently they are surprised when those strategies fail to meet expectations and do not result in the business impact they had anticipated. A common reaction is to blame the strategy itself and either scrap it for yet another strategy or try to tweak it to see if it can somehow be made more impactful. In some cases, management even projects the blame of failed strategies onto their organization and/or partners and initiate reorganizations in the hopes of cleaning house and replacing the old guard with those who “get it.” All of these scenarios contribute to placing companies into a continuous loop, rolling out change after change as their employees and partners struggle to keep up.

While some strategies and new initiatives are certainly misguided, all too frequently companies overlook the real reasons they don’t succeed: the companies failed to appreciate and plan for how the new strategy would get implemented and to provide their organizations or partners the tools they needed to land the strategy effectively. Adoption planning is essential to linking strategic investments and execution and significantly improves the chances that new strategic initiatives will succeed.

Basic Elements of a Landing Plan

With that in mind, companies should develop a landing plan that defines the landing process and how a strategy will be operationalized in conjunction with any significant strategic shift or new initiative. Although the specifics of that process will necessarily be situational and vary from company to company, in most instances there will be a set of common considerations involving:

• Assessing the ability or “readiness” of organizations to implement the initiative

• Identifying gaps

• Prioritizing changes and key actions required

• Executing an action plan, leveraging tools and resources that can assist

An Example: Landing Global Strategies in Subsidiary Organizations

One of our clients recently developed a series of entirely new business processes and significantly updated many others. Because execution of the processes is fundamental to the company’s success, it asked us for help in operationalizing them across all of its global subsidiaries. To ensure that the new approach succeeded, the company wanted to understand how capable each of its subsidiaries was to implement the new processes and to identify any potential issues to address them as early as possible.

Working closely with the client, Nextant developed a model that enabled subsidiaries programmatically to assess their level of execution of key processes and then to create individualized action plans to reach a level where the processes could be successfully adopted and executed.

In large part, the model was designed to:

The model involved three principal steps: (i) assessment and reviewing assessment results, (ii) prioritizing processes where improvement was needed, and (iii) creating individualized subsidiary action plans, leveraging pre-packaged solutions to the extent possible.

Along those lines, we first created an assessment tool that allows each subsidiary to understand its current “process maturity” (ability to implement each business process). More specifically, the tool measures the relationship of process maturity to business outcomes. The tool is portal-based, designed for self-assessment by each subsidiary, and feeds into a dashboard that shows each subsidiary where there are gaps in its capabilities. Using the dashboard, subsidiaries are quickly able to identify their gaps and prioritize areas of focus.

We also worked with each of the process owners to design blueprints that guide subsidiaries in reaching the required maturity level to be able to implement any given process in which they are deficient. Using the assessment and blueprints, subsidiaries are then able to create individualized action plans for executing the company’s new processes in their region.

The model thus identifies gaps in each subsidiary that would hinder adoption of the company’s new initiative, assists subsidiaries in addressing those gaps to ensure the strategy does not fail due to the inability to land and execute it, and provides broader insights to the company relating to its subsidiaries and the efficacy of its new strategy as it gets rolled out.

Other Applications

Importantly, the model described above for subsidiary organizations can be customized for use in a wide range of situations, including from landing high level strategies and initiatives and making them operational to more localized initiatives and from subsidiaries to local organizations to channel partners.

Companies must get ahead of strategic shifts and ensure their organizations, critical stakeholders, and partners are ready to succeed. This is true whether the new initiatives are internally or externally focused and will be company driven, partner driven, or some combination of the two. To that end, strategic success will depend on how well a company is able to stick the landing.

Look for follow-on posts that discuss other features and applications of Landing Plans.

For a printable PDF version of this post, click here

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Scott Hoing is a founding partner of Nextant LLC, a consulting firm specializing in assisting companies expand their businesses in international markets, with a strong focus on Latin America. Scott practiced as an attorney in a leading international law firm in Washington, D.C. and London, concentrating on international economic regulation and transactions. He also held positions as an executive and associate general counsel of a Fortune 100 company, where he served as secretary to the Audit Committee of its board of directors. Scott’s expertise centers around business and legal strategy development, regulation and compliance.

Scott's email is: shoing@nextant.com

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Nextant has extensive experience in assisting leading clients through its Market Expansion and Business Optimization services. For more information on how Nextant can assist your company in socializing a market entry and initiating sales, please visit our website at http://www.nextant.com

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