Building A Strategy-Focused Organization

Robert Kaplan and David Norton are respectfully, the "fathers of the Balanced Scorecard."

In this article, Building a Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton land on a number of principle "truths" about strategy - and execution:

• A recent study of 275 professional portfolio managers reported that the ability to execute
  strategy was more important than the quality of the strategy itself.
• In the early 1980s, a survey of management consultants reported that less than 10% of effectively formulated strategies were implemented successfully.
• A 1999 F ortune Magazine article, in a cover story of prominent CEO failures, concluded that the emphasis placed on strategy and vision created a mistaken belief that the right strategy was all that was needed to succeed. The authors concluded that “…in the majority of cases—we estimate 70 percent—the real problem isn’t [bad strategy]…it’s bad execution.

BOTTOMLINE: "Strategy must be understood and executed by everyone. The organization must be aligned around its strategy, and performance management systems help create that alignment."