Even thoroughly developed business strategies may fail if not enough attention is paid to their implementation. This rings particularly true with strategies based on innovation or implemented in complex or fast-changing environments. In the 20th century successful implementation leveraged stability and typically proceeded through hierarchy and control. Today the key is to stay vibrant and able to quickly respond to trends in competition and technology while not losing sight of the strategic objective. In this course we'll build a toolbox of techniques to execute today's business strategies to help them succeed. After completing this course, you'll be able to: - Create objectives and goals to guide strategy implementation - Identify organizational structures that fit particular strategies - Understand how to leverage company culture in implementation - Describe how to communicate the strategy so that the organization "gets" it - Detect and mitigate risks to implementation Workload: 2-4 hours per week
Introduction into Strategy Implementation
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Do curso por Copenhagen Business School
Implementação de Estratégias
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Course Intro. Translating Strategy Into Goals and Metrics
In this module we set the scene in strategy implementation and take a bird's-eye view of the course. We then dive into formulating actionable goals based on the strategy, good practices in creating metrics and setting objectives, and learn about two specific tools for deriving actionable, measurable goals from a strategy.
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Nicolai PogrebnyakovAssociate Professor
Department of International Economics and Management
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.
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