The Strategy-Execution Gap

From a Q&A interview with David Norton (inventor of the Balanced Scorecard)

• There have been a number of studies on the success rate companies have in executing strategy, and they generally conclude that something like nine out of ten organizations that have strategies fail to execute them. That's even true when those strategies have been well-formulated at the top and they have buy in from senior management. That's a pretty foreboding statistic.
• Alignment is about creating an approach and a framework that lets the organization define what's important and then cascade that and communicate that to the lower levels of the organization so everybody understands what the strategy is and how they fit in.
• If you don't link strategy management and operations management, then you're stuck in either a bottoms-up world, where you're focusing on operations and you don't really have control of whether it's impacting the strategy, or you come top down and focus only on strategy, but you can't make things happen. You've got to tie those two things together.

Read the rest of this Q&A here.