How to Make the Most of Your Company’s StrategyThe art of translating top management’s aspirations into concrete action on the ground

- Top management’s ideas become ambiguous as they are transferred to the general employees.

Strategy Briefing helps managers…

clarify these complex goals and performance measures encourage employees focus on specific objectives, in what order of priority. set parameters for their workers’ level of freedom for independent choices.

→ It ‘turns lofty strategic goals into a clear blueprint for execution’.

Step 1 - State What You Are Expected to Do and Why

“Set up a low-cost R&D center in Asia. By introducing new, less expensive offerings, the company hoped to fend off increasing competition from cheaper rivals.”

Task (What) Purpose (Why)To significantly reduce time to market for development, enhancements, and support of high-quality products to our customers in a cost-effective manner.

In order to help aggressively grow our revenues and increase our margins.

Still too broad and unrealistic.

Step 2 – Revise the Intent in the Context of Company’s Situation

1. Poor economy + competitors eating up market share

2. No future without market share

3. New product line needed to deliver outstanding customer service (key to maintain market share) at acceptable margins.

4. Not enough time

Two Levels Up (Corporate)What WhyTo transform the company within the next three years.

In order to deliver superior service and financial performance.

One Level Up (Technology Group)What WhyTo develop and support a coherent product line that is easy to service.

In order to allow sales and marketing to grow revenues.

FinalWhat WhyTo accelerate delivery of critical products to market.

In order to enable sales channels to halt market share erosion by year-end.

“If we give ourselves a target we can’t achieve, we’re setting ourselves up for failure.”

Step 3 – Determine which measures best indicate whether you’re achieving your goal.

Sometimes, the activities you see as most appropriate to your intent aren’t the ones you are actually assessed on.

There are mainly two categories in measurements:

- to see how well the company is doing to reach its goal,

- to see how much the company is losing.

Successful measurements stem from individuals knowing what their tasks should be.

Step 4 – Define the Tasks Implied By Your Intent

Define, prioritize, and cut tasks.

Prioritize by the order from the largest impact on the company’s overall intent to the least.

Step 5 – Define the Boundaries

What are constraints?

- Though there is no direct control over these constraints, defining them tells who to contact to solve them, both inside and outside the organization.

What range of freedom is given?

- Though it sounds paradoxical, boundaries give employees freedom. If they are not given boundaries, people consider ‘difficulties’ that they are expected to overcome as boundaries.

The Rollout

Strategy briefing is most successful when it is held throughout an organization. As the director assigns his/her intent, the subordinates’ “why” will become the director’s “what”, and the process will continue until no further analysis is necessary.

→ A company’s strategy is broken down into a cascade of discrete but linked elements that give a clear view downward toward actions and upward toward the strategy, and align functions across the organization.

Back-briefing also helps.

→ The unit doing the back-briefing checks its understanding of the direction it has received or worked out.

→ Superiors gain clarity about the implications of the direction they originally gave and may revise it as a result.

→ It provides an opportunity to ensure alignment across the organization as well as up and down.