Three Ingredients for Success

1. Strategy

The first ingredient is a viable strategy. Ultimately, the strategy challenge is to find an uncontested market space and a fully define the capabilities required to master it. Insights on these market opportunities come from a spark created between two components: a creative reading of the external world (outside in), on one hand, and an imaginative bending of existing or potential capabilities, on the other. A strategic opportunity is generated when an outside-in element is matched with an inside-out capability. A strategy represents the overall goals, transition states and desired outcomes from a linked set of strategic opportunities and underlying capabilities.

2. Structure

The second ingredient is structure. Structure translates the strategy into strategy roadmap. This roadmap has two logics. The horizontal logic sets the primary themes (transition states) of the strategy across time. The vertical logic links these primary strategic themes to:
• The financial outcomes
• The staging of the customer value proposition or impact
• The underlying operational requirements on the organization
• The necessary skills and capabilities necessary to succeed.

The combination of these two logics forms the outline of the implementation plan and clearly defines the critical success factors across a timeline for the strategy.

3. Process

The third ingredient is process. Process serves a dual role in strategy development and implementation. In development, establishing a clear process allows you to actively and passively engage the organization to establish a shared understanding of where you are trying to go and what will be required to succeed. Creating a shared mental model of where you are going and why – at all levels of the organization results in a broad base of ownership of the path forward and creates the basis for individual and collective accountability for implementation. In implementation, a well defined strategy management process enables the organization to readily assess changes in the competitive space and tune (evolve) its strategy over time.

The Real Time Strategy Formula for Successful Strategy Implementation.

Strategy + Structure + Process = Bias for Implementation

The quality of a strategy is defined not by the strength of the concept or the size of the potential impact but on the actual impact achieved. It is therefore imperative that the effort placed on developing the strategic goals be matched or exceeded by the effort to define the implementation requirements to reach these goals. Success requires you develop your strategy with a bias for implementation. To create this bias you must integrate the right concept (the Winning Idea as defined by Kim and Mauborgne), the right process to drive understanding, and the right structure which weaves together the financial expectations, the value delivered to your customer to the underlying operational requirements of processes, skills and capabilities. The structure forms the strategy roadmap which then serves a guide for the implementation. Metrics and milestones can be linked to the plan to manage the implementation.