Without effective execution, no business strategy can succeed. Unfortunately, most managers know far more about developing strategy than about executing it -- and overcoming the difficult political and organizational obstacles that stand in their way. In this book, leading consultant and Wharton professor Lawrence Hrebiniak offers the first comprehensive, disciplined process model for making strategy work in the real world. Drawing on his unsurpassed experience, Hrebiniak shows why execution is even more important than many senior executives realize, and sheds powerful new light on why businesses fail to deliver on even their most promising strategies. Next, he offers a systematic roadmap for execution that encompasses every key success factor: organizational structure, coordination, information sharing, incentives, controls, change management, culture, and the role of power and influence in your business. Making Strategy Work concludes with a start-to-finish case study showing how to use Hrebeniak's ideas to address one of today's most difficult business execution challenges: ensuring the success of a merger or acquisition.
I have often felt that many times the leadership of a company or even division was all about defining the strategy, where are we going and what are the overall goals. It was then up to the next level of management to make it happen. I am a manager and like most managers I have had a few occasions when I new where we should be going, I felt I clearly set the direction, but something in the execution failed and we did noting but waste a lot of time to get half measures. The world is full of good plans that failed due to poor performance. This book explains that a true leader needs to keep the execution of the strategy in mind when creating the direction. Combine the two and get your hands dirty in the working of the plan. This book is all about getting the job done, covering the processes and actions that need to get done to make solid strategies work.
The author created this book from real life experiences, either his own or those of case studies and interviews. He is giving the reader solid techniques derived from real world examples that were a success. I also got a great deal out of the final chapter. The author shows the reader how to apply what he has detailed in the book into a real life problem. Making a strategy come together and really work is either good management or luck and most of us are not that lucky. This book gives you the tools for making strategies work. What I liked about the book is even though the author is aiming for the CEO chair with the book, the methods he talks about could be used by any level of management on any size of project. The book is well written and enjoyable. It is well work your time.
Corporate strategy was a relatively new subject when I first became a strategy consultant in 1971. I remember executives picking bad strategies right and left and being totally clueless about how to implement a good strategy if they happened upon one.
Making Strategy Work is a good reminder that there are still organizations out there that have never picked a strategy that worked or implemented a workable strategy successfully. Yet these organizations are full of graduates of the most stellar business schools who know all the strategic management and planning lingo.
Professor Hrebiniak starts with the academic strategic lingo and clearly distills the key lessons of choosing and implementing strategies into bite-sized pieces for large organizations to implement.
It's not surprising that this book is filled with examples from the old AT&T and its remaining pieces, General Motors, Sears and other organizations known for their strategic problems. Mr. Hrebiniak has been there and done that in consulting for such organizations for many years, and describes their mind set well.
Naturally, if you are of more innovative and entrepreneurial orientation, you won't find this book nearly as interesting. But it's an important contribution to the literature that I'm surprised that someone didn't write long before now.
Well, they sort of did write this book before now. You can find pieces of this book in various books and articles . . . but Making Strategy Work is a convenient place to find all of those pieces in one place . . . for those who haven't developed and implemented a successful strategy before to get a sense of what they should be doing.
Product Details :
- File Size: 1798 KB
- Print Length: 408 pages
- Simultaneous Device Usage: Up to 5 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
- Publisher: Pearson Prentice Hall; 1 edition (January 5, 2005)
- Language: English
More Details about Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change, 1st Edition
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