Zealot is a strong word, but over the last 25 years, I’ve become obsessed with understanding how to help organizations activate their growth strategies and help people achieve their full potential, and I can’t think of a better “happy challenge” to pursue with clients. By no means do I have all the answers, but I’ve had the honor of working with some of the world’s best business leaders and am excited to share what I’ve learned.
When it comes to “strategy,” we know that:
- Most strategies fall woefully short of their full and intended potential – as Kaplan and Norton’s balanced scorecard highlights, 90% of strategies aren’t executed
- Most “growth” comes from participation in growing markets or revenue streams and not from the establishment of new revenue streams or even share gains
- Strategy is all about change and unlocking new potential, yet most leaders lack confidence in their firm’s ability to navigate change and transformation as my Accenture colleagues highlight in our recent research report, Change Reinvented
In a nutshell:
- Clients spend a lot of time and money on strategy development efforts
- That investment often falls short of its modeled ROI
- Leaders are far from confident that this will change in the future
That sounds like an opportunity to me.
What about the companies and the leaders who devise a strategy, participate in the right markets, execute that strategy, and take share or defend share over cycles and disruption? Who are those leaders, and what are they doing right that is both replicable and has the potential to lead to top quartile sustained performance?
I’ve been privileged to have a front-row seat as I’ve observed what many of these strategy activation and reinventive leaders do differently.
Let’s start by further exploring the status quo before moving to potential solutions.
Defining the All-Too-Common Reality with Strategy Activation
Larry Bossidy, former CEO of Honeywell, said, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.” When it comes to strategy activation inside organizations, this is all too often reality:
A small group of key leaders works on an enterprise growth strategy that is often tied to a long-range planning process or an external catalyst, such as the threat of activist investors. That process is usually robust in slide creation and light on rigorous dialogue and debate. As a result, over 50% of executive don’t believe the strategy they helped create will allow their organization to win.
The “deliverable” is a fancy PowerPoint that declares the company’s intent with lots of words that mean different things to different people and far too many dimensions to quickly understand, which I think may be the point. The Board provides some pressure testing before the strategy is ready to deploy.
In comes “change management”, which is a fancy term for one-way communications. Decks are refined, memos prepared, videos captured and maybe an infographic called Company 2030goes out across the enterprise.
The challenge is new growth strategies usually require new beliefs about how the firm can create value. These new beliefs when embraced can create new routines which eventually become new capabilities that unlock value in the marketplace. But none of this happens with “change management” because one-way communications are necessary in any business (pizza is in the lunchroom, welcome our new hires, or healthcare open enrollment starts December 1st), but far from sufficient for creating mindset and behavioral change.
The truth is for maybe the single most important ongoing business process, strategy activation, most companies don’t have a process or methodology at all. Most organizations have a goal deployment methodology, but they lack a holistic and iterative business process for strategy activation that is owned & governed by the c-suite. This is at the heart of why 66% of change initiatives fail. Only 30% of leaders feel confident about their change capabilities, and most strategies fail to achieve their full and intended potential.
Part of the reason it plays out this way is because nobody owns strategy activation.
(This is thankfully starting to change as I’m seeing the Chief Strategy Officer and Strategy function as a whole focused more and more on activation, but we still have a long way to go: The Strategy Activation Leader).
The good news is we have 30 years of experience in this field and have taken a lot of notes. So, there are codified and replicable approaches to activate strategy to drive shareholder return. And because nobody wants to hear the problem without the hope of a solution.
Brad Haudan, Managing Director, Root, Part of Accenture, is a global leader in Strategy Activation who works with G2000 executive teams and their people on aligning around and activating their strategy across the enterprise.
