Making Strategy Work

Formulating strategy is one thing. Executing it throughout the entire organization... well, that's the really hard part. 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, Larry Hrebiniak offers a comprehensive, disciplined process model for making strategy work in the real world.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. 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 the execution process.Making Strategy Work concludes with a start-to-finish case study showing how to use Hrebiniak's ideas to address one of today's most difficult business execution challenges: ensuring the success of a merger or acquisition. The advice on making M&A strategies work justifies the addition of this book to any execution toolkit. Building the capabilities and culture you'll need to execute How to align your organization's skills, resources, and culture around the strategies you're pursuing Integrating long-term strategy with short-term operations Why managing the short-term is crucial to the success of long-term strategy Ensuring robust coordination... up, down, and sideways Effective information sharing and cooperation: bringing coherence and focus to execution Managing change, including culture change Avoiding "speed traps," resistance, and other change-related problems that hurt execution

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.