Strategy Acceleration
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Why does executing strategies often fail?
Let’s start by asking a question: why does executing a strategy often fail? MIT made a study to find out why. They asked the CEO to name their companies’ three most important strategic initiatives, and when they went out into the organizations on different levels asking the same question looking for the same answers.
What MIT found out was that already on the executive level only 51% of asked colleagues could give the same answers. While going down in the organization this problem amplifies, and on the employee-level only 13% could give the same answer as the CEO.
Why is this a problem? While the executives not being aligned is a problem, the majority of employees don’t even know what to focus on, it will be impossible for them to execute on your strategy.
The remedy
The remedy of this problem is to implement Strategy Acceleration within your company. This means that you clear up what’s the most important goals for your organization, define what needs to be done to get there, and align your co-workers to get there together.
This is where the Howwe way of working comes into play.
Business Agility
Agile – A way of working .
Let’s clear up the confusion.
To clear up the confusion, let’s take a closer look at distinguishing the “Business Agile” and other forms of Agile ways of working. One thing Business Agile clearly is not, is IT-agile. As we know, IT-agile is the birthplace of the Agile manifesto, where we have scrums, sprints, work breakdown structures, and so on. While this way of working has proven to work very efficiently in IT-development teams, it has proven to be perform quite poorly when implemented in other types of departments, such as finance, sales, or a management team.
Don’t do IT-agility scaled down
Something that works equally as poorly is trying to do the IT-agility but scaled down, where a consultancy comes in to push collaborative and more cross functional activities, which to be fair can work well in a start-up-scenario, but doesn’t work as well in a larger corporation. You have the same problem on the other side as well, where management consultants who, during the last couple of years have tried to push very elegant models that are way too complicated for any type of real life scenarios.
What is business agile?
So, what exactly is Business Agile you might be wondering?
Well, Business Agile companies execute their strategies faster. This in turn makes them grow faster, making them way more profitable than their industry peers.
Business Agility requires relentless execution in two skills, 1) knowing what to prioritize, from a bunch of different goals, what is the most important goal for us to focus on, and 2) Have the ability as an organization to gain the commitment for all co-workers to focus on these particular goals.
With these two skills in mind, you are well on your way to becoming more Business Agile.