STRATEGY implementation is a bit like tidying your bedroom. It seems like a good idea and you have a clear objective, but when you get down to it, it isn’t as easy or as exciting as it could be, and you end up leaving the place in disarray.

There are lots of chief executives who have experienced the corporate equivalent of a messy bedroom only to find that their carefully-formulated strategies for tidiness have led them to close the door quietly behind them.

The basic problem is usually not one of bad strategy but badly-executed strategy. Business brains, it seems, are better at drawing up strategies than at implementing them. The Economist Intelligence Unit and Marakon Associates found that two-thirds of senior executives believe they are worse at executing a strategy than at developing it. This shortfall is hitting them where it hurts — in their wallets.

Increasingly the ability to draw up a decent strategy isn’t seen as particularly big or clever. Let’s face it, there is no shortage of consultants and MBA graduates who have read the books and bought the T-shirts. It is the ability to execute well that differentiates. But the two — planning and implementation — aren’t mutually exclusive, says Jim Scholes, a director of Strategos, a strategy consultancy, and professor of management science at Lancaster University Management School. “If strategy is effectively coming from outside the organisation — often from consultants and sometimes from inside the heads of one or two very smart people — implementation is almost bound to be problematic,” he said. “Think about it this way: if a strategy is beyond an organisation’s capability to conceive, why should one believe it is within its capability to implement?”

It is a situation which is akin to trying to build a flat-pack kitchen using only the designer’s sketch. That is why Scholes advocates bringing designers and builders together.

Good examples of companies that have used collective brain power to align thinkers and doers include Danone, in Poland, which sent its top management team with a group of 20 young managers on fact-finding tours to London, Chicago, Istanbul and Barcelona to come up with new local strategies. There is also Nokia, which turned around its fortunes with the creation of a company-wide “strategy architecture” to involve all employees in generating new ideas.

Linda Holbeche, director of research and strategy at Roffey Park, agrees: “It is not just about drawing on the brains at the top but about drawing on everyone’s brains.”

She says that if the people implementing the strategy are different from those who devised it, then there needs to be flexibility and “space for people to bring their own two-pennorth”. The downfall of many a strategy has been the “Fred said” scenario, with people slavishly following instructions unable to take any initiative, she adds.


DATA FILE

STRATEGY is a word that has been hijacked by academics and profiteers. It sounds important and it promises to give us a leg up in corporate life, if only we knew what it meant. In this ten-week series Career is translating some of the gobbledegook into practical advice. Each week we cover an aspect of the basics — What is a strategy? How can you get one? And why bother?


This week we talked to Roffey Park(www.roffeypark.com), we read Steps to Implementation by Jim Scholes, published on the European Business Forum (www.ebfonline.com), and Strategy: Create and Implement the Best Strategy for Your Business (Harvard Business Essentials, £12.99)

Next week: How you can learn to think more strategically and why you would want to anyway.

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