Hello. My name is Nicolai Pogrebnyakov. I'm an Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School. This is a course on strategy implementation. If you've taken other courses in this specialization, by now you know a lot about what strategy is and how it can be linked with implementation. In this course, we'll take a closer look at components of strategy implementation. In this introductory video, we'll talk about why implementation matters. And we'll briefly the review components of strategy implementation that we'll be studying in detailed later in the course. Let's start with thinking about why we should care about implementation at all. It turns out that much of what companies planned does not work out well. In fact, well over half, and according to some estimates, around three quarters of change initiatives at companies, underperform in practice. One example of a strategic initiative is the acquisition of another company. One large-scale study looked at acquisitions in the US over 20 years, from 1980 to 2001. And what it showed was that an average acquisition actually loses money for shareholders. Acquisitions of public firms, for example, on average lost almost six cents on the dollar. And when the researcher added up these acquisitions over the years, only acquisitions, and only in the US alone, lost about $275,000,000. So what is going on here? The question we need to ask is, are we dealing with the failure of strategy or implementation here? When an initiative fails, is it because the strategy was bad or because it was badly implemented? And conversely of course, when something goes well, was it good strategy or good execution? And actually can we separate one from the other, strategy from implementation? It can be tricky question to answer. And I hope that in this course we'll see how strategy and implementation is, or should be at least, linked together. Let's now look at an example of strategy implementation. The field of corporate strategy took a lot of inspiration from military strategy. And here we'll look at the battle of Zela. It took place over 2,000 years ago in the year 47 BC. It pitted King Pharnaces II against Julius Caesar of Rome. Pharnaces created a strategy to defeat Caesar that had several elements. First, Caesar was out numbered, the army of Pharnaces was almost twice as large as that of Caesar. Second, Pharnaces occupied a hill top. This, of course, makes it easier both to attack and defend. Also, he did something very interesting. While Caesar's army was constructing fortifications on another hill close by, Pharnaces came down from his hill and attacked Caesar. This took Caesar army by surprise, because you typically don't give up a position on a hill to attack uphill. But Caesar's forces quickly recovered, fought back, and defeated Pharnaces. It was actually after that battle that Caesar wrote to the Roman Senate, veni vidi vici, I came, I saw, I conquered. What brought Pharnaces down? His strategy seemingly was good, outnumber Caesar, occupy a good position on a hill, launch a surprise attack. Was it poor implementation? Well, he did manage to catch Caesar's army by surprise, but he probably didn't consider that Caesar's forces were very well trained. So, in the end it looks like a failure of both the strategy and its implementation. He didn't sufficiently think through how his opponent would react. So in real life, it's sometimes hard to separate the success or failure of a strategy from its implementation, and we should work thoroughly on both. By the way, another takeaway here is that both Caesar and Pharnaces were fighting right there with their soldiers. They were executing their own strategy. And as you implement your strategies, keep this in mind and be engaged in implementation. Successful implementation of a strategy involves two things, setting up appropriate structures to support implementation, such as goals, and using your managerial skills, for example, to work with centers of power and their organization. These are the structural aspects of strategy implementation that we'll look at in this course. Goals and Measures. How to translate a strategy into short-term and long-term objectives and measures. Organizational Structure. How an organization and its units can be structured. And how structure can support implementation. Organizational Culture. How it can be changed or sustained, and how we can use cultural values in strategy implementation. And these are the aspects of implementation that need managerial skills. Communication and knowledge sharing. How to communicate the strategy throughout the organizations. Sometimes a new strategic initiative needs to change something of the company, and that could cause the resistance. We'll talk about how to mitigate resistance to change. And finally how we can use power in informal networks, which exist at any organization, to support implementation. It's important to pay attention to these aspects of implementation. And the good strategy that is implemented well can get you a long way. For example, in January of 2000, at the MacWorld event, Steve Jobs laid out his vision for the next wave of evolution of consumer technology. He spoke about an explosion of digital devices such as cell phones, portable music players, portable DVD players, digital cameras, and hand-held organizers. And he said that Apple will leverage the strength of its Mac computer to work with all these devices. And in the years since, Apple entered pretty much every segment of computer electronics that Steve Jobs' mentioned in early 2000. Cellphones and digital organizers, the iPhone. Portable music player, the iPod and iTunes. Jobs even said how Apple will do that through a combination of hardware, operating system, applications, internet connectivity and marketing of the product. He laid out the whole strategy that Apple would follow in the next decade, and each Apple's product combines these elements, the hardware, applications, marketing and so on. So the strategy was out there for the taking. Any company, any entrepreneur could take it and use it. But it was only Apple who managed to implement the strategy so successfully. Welcome to the course.
