HBR on Strategy Execution

In HBR’s latest edition on Strategy execution, the following factors “Too busy ; Lack of time & resource constraints”, “Lack of decisive leadership”, and “Making it meanigful for frontline workers” and “Poor communication” were cited to be the top obstacles to executing a strategy – according to HBR's latest panel research.
Two articles in this edition, each with quite opposite accents, caught my attention: One focusing on the ‘soft management school of thought’ about empowering workers at all levels in an organization, and one surprisingly blunt article about the role – and necessity - of power and political gameplay to get things done in a large organization.

The first article titled “The Execution Trap” the author refutes the classical thinking that there is a distinct difference between strategy and execution. In an illustrative example, he cites a consulting experience in a retail bank back in the 1980’s, where he interviewed a front-line worker on her customer service approach. During the interview, the woman described in detail how she adjusted her sales pitch to the individual customer at hand. Reflecting on her behavior, she intuitively distinguished three persona’s (relationship-driven, advice-driven and efficiency-driven/self-directed) - corresponding largely to high-level attitudinal segments so common in today’s market research. This sophistication stood in contrast to the job instructions provided to her:  "just do the transaction and be friendly".

The author states that by situationally adopting her approach, this woman rejected the top-down strategy model imposed on her, and that she implemented her own customer service strategy. Moreover, she did not feel supported to share her developed practices with peers – let alone with her bosses. It was after all, not the company’s strategy to do things this the way she developed.

The author concludes that being pushed into ‘choiceless doer’ roles - as opposed to ‘strategic thinking’ roles - often stimulates helplessness, lethargy, or belligerence. A lot of data and information from within the organisation gets lost or underused, and management turns to consultants (sic) for advice on the next strategic move. The consultant's recommendation then get pushed again into the organisation. Enter the vicious circle.
Companies should therefore stimulate empowerment where strategy formulation is everyone’s business, within the context of his/her area of responsibility. Choice makers upstream should set the frame for further decisions downstream, and create a virtuous circle of ‘integrated strategy execution’. Finally, it is noted that in large organisation this cascade can be extensive. So far for this Columbus' Egg article.

Random comments:

• The 1980’s example is intriguing in the sense that the core of CRM hasn’t changed that much over the last 30 years.

• It reminds me of an often heard comment from senior colleagues about change: “10 years ago we had the same discussions…” . Management focus and organisational culture follows a pendulum movement swinging between centralisation & decentralisation.

• Many organisations seem to have done reasonably well in spite of the (sensible) recommendations in this article. It is difficult to conduct a what-if analysis when it comes to organisational culture or behavior (e.g., what would have happened if this or that CEO had not installed such a culture). Taleb in his book The Black Swan also makes this point when he talks on the difficulty of (re-)narrating history . Taleb also states that social-science belongs to ‘extremistan’ (i.e. the world of the unpredictable) and that common belief is overly optimistic about applying a reductionist or positivist approach to the social sciences.

• The author does a good job in pleading for strategic alignment across the whole organization and the role of empowering employees in this process (to the extent that the libraries of progressive management literature have not covered this so far). He falls short however of providing some practical tips to make this happen or to explain what the obstacles to this harmonic model are. And he completely fails in recognizing the role of hierarchical pushing and politics often required to get shit done – which happens to be the topic of the second Article “Power play”.


As for that second article, it was enjoyable read and an apparent precursor to the authors’ fortcoming book on Power in organizations (with the creative title 'Power'). Considering Jeffrey Pfeffer's publication record on Amazon (warning: his book titles keep displaying the same touch of creativity though), he does seem a promising read.