Strategy Creation and Execution

Does your strategy creation and strategy execution process result in continual increases in market share and sustainable profitability?

An effective business strategy is balanced with thinking and action. Strategy creation is strategic thinking. Strategy execution is translating your strategic thinking into strategic action.

We have 30 years experience helping manufacturers, manufacturers’ representatives, and distributors of all sizes and lines of trade implement the following 10 best-practice strategy steps:

1. Strategy Team Selection

Select and organize cross-functional strategy team members with the right structure and accountability. Effective strategy teams include creative and innovative thinkers from a diverse group of people. An effective strategy process contains a structure that encourages strategic thinking. It involves different analytical process through each cycle of the meeting

2. “Outside-In” Market Research

Gather confidential, honest, and candid "Outside-In" market research. An effective strategy creation processes balances "inside-out" thinking with "outside-in" thinking. This should include both customer market research and supplier market research.

3. Competitor Profiling

Execute a sound analysis of the competitive landscape through competitor profiling, analysis, and positioning. Competitors come and go. Competitors change strategies The key to every company’s strategic success is to intelligently know your competitors, continually keep updated on their strategic moves, and stake out both offensive and defensive position that defeat your opponents

4. SWOT Analysis

Conduct comprehensive SWOT analysis to leverage company’s competencies and minimize competitive disadvantages. Having. tested the outside world through market research and competitor profiles, a company is now positioned to conduct an objective and thorough analysis of the company’s internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats.

5. Critical Success Factors

Identify critical success factors that comprise the unique strategic factors that define where you need to be as an organization. They might include achieving operational excellence, or becoming a customer-centric organization, or differentiating your products and services, or driving service innovation, or acquiring and retaining the best talent to name a few possible critical success factors.

6. Strategic Objective and Goals

Craft strategic objectives and strategic goals. Strategic objectives is made up of vision (where do we want to go?), mission (what do we stand for?), and core values (what do we believe?). Any business cannot survive without aiming at a specific goal. Strategic goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound goals you want to achieve over the next three to five years.

7. Balanced Scorecards

Create balanced scorecards. Most company’s fail to turn strategy into action. Building performance scorecards that support the strategy for the company, every strategic business unit, every department, and each employee turns strategy into positive, actionable results. Balanced scorecards represent an approach to strategic management that surfaced in the early 1990’s. Robert Kaplan and David Norton authored three Harvard Business Review articles that surfaced four critical measurement categories – financial; customer and market; internal business process; and, employee innovation, learning and growth.

8. Strategy Execution Teams

Deploy strategy execution teams to support achievement of strategic objectives, goals, and balanced scorecard. Poor execution is the number-one reason company strategies fail. Strategy execution often goes wrong when the people in the organization who are reasonable for strategy creation are not also responsible or strategy execution. When the individuals who create the strategy are dually responsible to lead its execution, any resistance to change is minimized and strategic success is maximized.

9. Incentive Compensation Plans

Develop company-wide incentive compensation plans based upon achievement of company’s strategy. Financial compensation is a powerful performance lever. Designed effectively, company-wide incentive compensation plans creates the needed push for achieving a successfully executed business strategy.

10. Formal Coaching

Implement formal coaching process throughout the organization that supports achievement of company’s strategy. Developing and executing an effective coaching process that drives every employee to achieve higher performance levels is one of the most difficult tasks company leaders face. The right high-performance coaching process ensures all individual and team performance goals linked to your business strategy are accomplished.