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Executing Your Strategy: How to Break It Down and Get It Done [Hardcover]

Mark Morgan (Author), Raymond E. Levitt (Author), William A. Malek (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews) |
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Book Description

Publication Date: January 7, 2008 | ISBN-10: 1591399564 | ISBN-13: 978-1591399568
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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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mark Morgan is Chief Learning Officer at IPSolutions Inc. and Practice Director of the Stanford Advanced Project Management Program (SAPM). Raymond Levitt is a Professor in Stanford's School of Engineering and Academic Director of SAPM. William Malek is an independent consultant, educator and trainer, former CEO of IPSolutions, Inc., and SAPM Program Director from 2002 to 2006.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (January 7, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1591399564
  • ISBN-13: 978-1591399568
  • Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
While the book is titled, "Executing the Strategy" it might more accurately be titled "Organizational Alignment" - strategy being only one, albeit the most central, of the domains of the Authors' brilliant and comprehensive Strategic Execution Framework (SEF).

Readers may miss one of the more subtle but most important gifts of the book which is to recognize that most failures in strategic execution come from not managing the interfaces between the various domains of the corporate organism, defined in the SEF: Ideation (Identity, Purpose, Long-Range Intention), Vision (Strategy, Goals, Metrics), Nature( Strategy, Culture, Organizational Structure), Engagement (Strategy, Portfolio Management), Synthesis (Portfolio Management, Program Management, Project Management), and Transition (Program Management, Project Management and Operations).

Theory of Constraints and Six Sigma aficionados take note: the greatest unaccounted for source of variability in organizational performance occurs at the interfaces between these SEF domains. Today, most organizations do not manage these interfaces at more than a superficial level, if at all. Further, the strategy domain directly interfaces with more areas of the corporate organism than any other: culture, structure, goals, metrics, and portfolio. It is no wonder that 70-90% of companies are consistently failing to execute strategies successfully.

The book succeeds well in setting out the SEF, but don't expect guidance on how to go about setting vision or strategy or improving project or portfolio management, changing culture, or setting the right metrics. Rather, each of these domains represents large bodies of knowledge, and this book's purpose is to identify them, and define the interfaces between them. The subtitle, "How to Break it Down & Get it Done" might imply the presence of more nitty-gritty how-to's than this book sets out to provide.

Another major takeaway is that the "lowly" discipline of project management will be the cornerstone of successfully executing strategy in combination with the SEF. Strategy is not just about upper management setting a bold vision in a weekend retreat and saying, "make it so". Strategic planning must account for the ripple effects through all of the organizational domains, and projects need to be chartered, resourced and managed between and within domains for the strategy to be carried off successfully.

The authors provide numerous compelling real-world examples; including many from their own consulting practices to demonstrate how correct organizational alignment leads to success and misalignment leads to failure. The authors have particular experience and success with larger organizations, where the SEF particularly shines. This book is an outstanding and seminal contribution to organizational alignment and strategic execution.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Books on strategy formulation are plentiful, but relatively few have been written on executing strategy. This book is a major contribution in this arena, providing an insightful path for moving from strategy to ongoing operations.

The authors provide a useful six-part model ("strategic execution framework"). As very briefly highlighted by the authors, the six parts are:

- clarifying and communicating identity, purpose, and long-term intention;
- aligning strategy, culture and structure;
- translating long-term intentions into goals, metrics and strategy;
- engaging strategy via the project investments stream;
- monitoring and continuously aligning project work with strategy; and
- transferring projects to operations.
A chapter is devoted to each of these aspects of the model. Reading the chapters will enable you to fully understand and appreciate its usefulness in operational context and from a leadership standpoint.

A keystone is the role of project management in transforming strategic intentions into operational realities.

This book is well organized, crisply written, and rich with practical content, including diagrams, tables, and rating scales to measure your organization. Overall, the authors have created a standout-achievement that will be of value to any organizational leader.
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30 of 38 people found the following review helpful
Terrible! July 11, 2008
Format:Hardcover
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Great ideas on execution of strategy....
There are millions of projects that fail each year due to lack of execution on strategy. Many projects find it difficult to transition from purpose to goal, culture to structure,... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Pecos Bill
Helpful strategy planning book
If you need help figuring out how to plan to motivate your company, this book is very informative. It helped me in planning for my own job.
Published on November 4, 2009 by Jason Bertran Blackmon
Usage of this book
These days you find books that study the market and behavior of organizations and find good practices, try to formulate the good/bad and do/don't with a lot of valuable examples... Read more
Published on March 5, 2009 by H. Ali Abdulaal
Ironically, Good ideas that were not well executived
The book's theme as articulated in the introductory chapter is a good one: organizations often fail to implement their strategies due to failure to convert strategies into... Read more
Published on November 21, 2008 by John L. Daly
Straightforward guide to getting it done
Mark Morgan, Raymond E. Levitt and William Malek, a team with academic and hands-on experience at strategy execution, go directly to the heart of getting things accomplished. Read more
Published on October 22, 2008 by Rolf Dobelli
Perils and opportunities in the six domains of the strategic execution...
In this volume, Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt, and William Malek focus their attention on "engaging in strategic project portfolio management for successful execution" and more... Read more
Published on August 20, 2008 by Robert Morris
Read it if you want to get confused on strategy, implement it if you...
I must confess, even if you have the above intentions, you will need a lot of patience to read this book. Read more
Published on August 2, 2008 by ARMAN KIRIM, PhD
Connects Strategy with Project Management
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. Read more
Published on June 23, 2008 by Nikolaos Stylos
What Project Management is Important, How can this be?
I love this book. The Executives make a decision and then stand back and hope it gets implemented. Everything must be tied together. Read more
Published on June 16, 2008 by Michelle M. Griffin
Too academic to be useful
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. Read more
Published on June 1, 2008 by N. Gonzalez
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
engagement imperative, ideation imperative, synthesis imperative, transition imperative, strong ideation, strong matrix structure, weak matrix structure, planned portfolio, engagement domain, strategic execution, vision imperative, strategic identity, synthesis domain, rate your organization, strategy makers, reciprocal interdependency, vision domain, reciprocal interdependencies, culture egg, benefits realization, real portfolio, matrix strength, execution framework, customer outcomes, project outputs
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Project Leadership Imperatives, Strategy-Making Imperatives, New Coke, Mark Hurd, New York, Skunk Works, Southwest Airlines, Western Union, Most Often Requested Items, Financial Times, The Importance of Proper Prioritization, Carly Fiorina, Rich Grimes, New Orleans, The Odyssey Debacle, Global Services, Aligning Projects, Fault Line, Michael Porter, Geoffrey Moore, Any Economy, Nature Imperative
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