Executing Your Strategy: How to
Break It Down and Get It Done by
William A. Malek
Straightforward Guide To Getting It Done
Why do businesses consistently fail to execute their competitive
strategies? Because leaders dont identify and invest in the full range of
projects and programs required to align the organization with its strategy.
Moreover, even when strategy makers do break their plans down into
doable chunks, they seldom work with project leaders to prioritize strategic
investments and assure that needed resources are applied in priority
order. And they often neglect to revise the strategic portfolio to fit the
demands of a dynamic environment, or to stay connected to strategic
projects through completion, as new products, services, skills and
capabilities are transferred into operations.

In Executing Your Strategy, Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt, and William
Malek present six imperatives that enable you to do the right strategic
projects--and do those projects right. And it is no accident that the six
imperatives combine to create the acronym INVEST:
Ideation: Clarify and communicate Purpose, Identity and Long Range
Intention
Nature: Develop alignment between Strategy, Structure and Culture based
on Ideation
Vision: Create clear Goals and Metrics aligned to Strategy and guided by
Ideation
Engagement: Do the right projects based on the Strategy through Portfolio
management
Synthesis: Do Projects and Programs right, in alignment with Portfolio
Transition: Move the Project and Program outputs into Operations where
benefit is realized
Full of intriguing company examples and practical advice, this crucial new
resource shows you how to make strategy happen in your organization
Personal Review: Executing Your Strategy: How to Break It
Down and Get It Done by William A. Malek
In this volume, Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt, and William Malek focus
their attention on "engaging in strategic project portfolio management for
successful execution" and more specifically on the six domains of the
strategic execution network, their acronym INVEST: Ideation (clarify and
communicate purpose, identity and long- range intention), Nature (develop
alignment between and among strategy, structure, and culture based on
ideation), Vision (create clear goals and metrics aligned to strategy and
guided by ideation), Engagement (engage the strategy via the investment

stream), Synthesis (do projects and programs right, in alignment with
portfolio), and Transition (transfer the projects and program outputs into
operations where their benefits can be realized). Morgan, Levitt, and Malek
devote a separate chapter to each. In the final chapter, they respond to a
question their reader has no doubt by then asked: "Where should we
start?" Although much (if not most) of this material examines strategy
execution in an organization, the authors use Lance Armstrong as an
example of how an individual can also "align all the [strategy-making]
domains and invest every precious minute, and every personal resource,
accordingly."
I was especially interested in the material provided in Chapter Three as the
authors examine how to align an organization's culture and structure with
its strategy. This is precisely the approach Louis Gerstner took after be
assumed his duties as CEO of IBM. His mindset could be described as
"outside-in" as he carefully determined how to achieve a strategic fit with
IBM's external environment and then redefined his company's "nature."
That is, he ensured that strategy, structure, and culture in the nature
domain were in proper alignment with the ideation and vision domains.
That is why IBM, previously a maker of branded products, redefined its
"nature" to be that of a provider of custom integrated IT solutions for its
global clients.
Morgan, Levitt, and Malek note that, in contrast, many strategists "focus on
designing strategies that fit the external environment. They underestimate,
as [Carly] Fiorina and the HP board appear to have done, the equally
important issue of strategic fit with the internal environment. As [Mark]
Hurd's early results revealed, the idea of combining with Compaq was not
inherently flawed but misaligned with the nature of HP - its DNA as
Gerstner would put it." I presume to add that, to a lesser extent, the same
challenges await those companies that are considering a strategic alliance.
In the same chapter, they also examine four generic types of culture and
agree with William Schneider (author of The Reengineering Alternative: A
Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work) that in each of the four, its
members share a dominant value. For example, "A competence culture
believes in the `Field of Dreams' principle: make great products and people
will flock to buy them. It values technical values above all else." The other
types of culture are Collaboration (understanding the unique needs of
customers), Cultivation (recruiting, retaining, and nurturing creative
employees to produce unique products), and Control (low cost production
of standard outputs).
Readers will appreciate the authors' skillful use of dozens of Tables and
Figures throughout their lively narrative that consolidate key points. In
Chapter 3, for example, the Tables illustrate "The four archetypes of
organizational culture" (Page 101), Measure your organization's culture"
(Page 135), "Measure you organization's structure" (Page 136), and
"Measure your organization's strategy within the nature domain" (Page

137). In the same chapter, these are the Figures: "The nature imperative:
Invest in projects to align culture, structure, and strategy" (Page 94), Align
strategy with culture: Charting your culture egg" (Page 101), "The culture
egg for a custom manufacturer" (Page 102), "Template for testing the
alignment of strategy and culture" (Page 103), "HP's strategy-culture
alignment map" (Page 103), "Formal matrix combines functional
excellence with product/program focus" (Page 113), "Identify the apprriate
alignment of strategy, structure, and culture" (Page 115), and "Achieving
the nature imperative at DPR [Construction]: Aligning strategy, structure,
and culture required careful ongoing investments" (Page 133). The other
five chapters have equally informative Tables and Figures; also additional
real-world examples of how some companies successfully executed
strategies and other companies tried but failed to do so.
In the final chapter, the authors reiterate six imperatives of strategic
execution (first displayed by Table 1.1 on Page 17 and then duplicated by
Table C-1, Page 241), cite several real-world examples (e.g. Airbus and
the perils of misalignment), discuss Lance Armstrong and the lessons to
be learned from his successful execution of various strategies, and then
pose what they call six "Acid Test Questions (on Pages 256-257) that
could be read first, before proceeding through the Introduction and the six
chapters. I wish I had done so because they provide an especially valuable
frame of refernce for the wealth of information, insights, and
recommendations that Morgan, Levitt, and Malek provide.
Their book is a brilliant achivement.
* * * * *
Those who share my high regard for it are urged to check out Schneider's
aforementioned book as well as Lawrence Hrebiniak's Making Strategy
Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change and Doing What Matters:
How to Get Results That Make a Difference - The Revolutionary Old-
School Approach co-authored by James Kilt with John Manfredi and
Robert Lorder. Also A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan's The Game-Changer:
How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, Noel
Tichy and Warren Bennis' Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great
Calls, Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking
the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Enterprise
Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution
co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson.
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