Three Barriers Preventing Effective Strategy Execution

For small and mid-size businesses, there are three primary barriers to executing strategy more effectively:

• Economics. While larger businesses can afford to invest significantly in resources like consultants, coaching, systems and software, small businesses simply cannot afford these expensive offerings – let alone the resources and expertise to integrate them into a single system.
  Expertise. While larger enterprises have access to resources, best-practices and expertise on individual disciplines like strategic planning, performance management, business intelligence, TQM, balanced scorecards, etc., small businesses lack the expertise, resources or understanding of how to tie their strategic goals to the day-to-day activities of their people.
• Human Factors. Both large and small businesses have the same fundamental challenge: they’re run by people. For the most part, they know the right things to do. But the fact is, they don’t always do them. Organizational behavior, attitudes, motivation, habits, resistance – many human nature factors can contribute to poor execution – and are certainly barriers to sustainable performance improvement.
  

Even more important is: how to address these barriers in such a way as to make performance improvement sustainable - year after year.

So…what is the solution?

What is needed is a sustainable program for business excellence – one that is optimized for execution.