Companies who execute well are those who keep their strategy front and center. They create a rhythm and cadence for balancing long-term planning with short-term results.
The executives at Amazon review their strategy every Tuesday. Most of our mid-market clients meet quarterly to update their strategy based on changing market conditions. Many entrepreneurs in smaller companies meet monthly to review their progress on strategic priorities.film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 2017 online streaming
As it relates to the strategic execution, the frequency of such meetings has nothing to do with size. It has everything to do with building muscle. In order to gauge how thoughtful a management team is about execution, all one has to do is look at the rituals they employ related to updating and communicating their strategic priorities.
One can learn a lot about how a company ticks by the meetings they hold, their duration and regularity. If the CEO holds a monthly strategy meeting in which progress is tracked, projects are more likely to be completed on time. In other environments where meetings are infrequent, the rhythm of a management team is disrupted. This leads to longer, mismanaged strategy meetings that are highly unproductive.
Of course, a management team needs to have a strategy in the first place, and their strategy should be organized into a set of management objectives, with stated champions and dates. It is only through this granularity that execution can be tracked and measured with precision. A complaint I hear regularly from CEOs is “if only I could hold my team accountable”. My response is always, “to what?” Failure to convert strategies into tactics and track them regularly leads to a gap that can be hard to close.
Once a strategic planning process is built and well executed, an organization can create a repeatable cycle that will foster innovation while also ensuring better-operating results.
It is this collision between strategy and tactics, the balance between what is and what could be is the essence of execution. Make sure you create a muscle in executing against your strategic initiatives.