Ferguson asked:


It is one thing to develop a top business strategy and quite another to see that strategy effectively executed. Simply view this glaring figure from Fortune Magazine, which recently stated that “less than 10% of strategies effectively formulated are effectively executed.”

As this statistic easily shows, organizations too often fall within the majority rather than the minority when it comes to strategy execution. Many strategic plans are doomed during the initial stages of development because they lack foresight or fail to incorporate all areas of operations. And even if a strategic business plan is well-developed, seeing it out requires at least as much or even more dedication.

Like anything in the business world, strategy execution requires persistence, patience, and flexibility among many other things. With the everyday demands that come with running a business and performing ongoing work tasks, it is quite easy for strategy execution to fall by the wayside. Yet studies (and common sense) indicate that organizations able to execute mediocre strategies far outperform those with brilliant, yet poorly implemented strategies.

If strategy execution has proven itself to be so difficult, what can management teams do to better ensure success? They can focus on “Enterprise Strategy Execution,” a proven, ongoing process that encompasses a series of stages, steps, and methodologies, which together help organizations evolve toward a more performance-focused, strategically-aligned, results-driven culture.

So what exactly is Enterprise Strategy Execution? Basically, Enterprise Strategy Execution (ESE) empowers every employee toward a common strategy by focusing on a continual process of prioritization, improvement, and control.

In other words, ESE solidifies your workforce towards contributing to the development and implementation of a successful strategy via these three important parameters. Your organization plans and deploys strategic objectives during prioritization, while employees and management continually fix performance gaps in the most critical areas throughout improvement, and subsequently lock-in on improvement gains during control.

Each of these three major areas contains sub-sets or specific focus areas that help an organization progress:

PRIORITIZATION

Exposure and Epiphany where a critical organizational need creates an impetus for change (an “ah-ha” moment occurs within the leadership team)

Executive Buy-in & Support where additional leadership approval is gained to continue the focus on Strategy Execution (this typically occurs among the executives charged with developing strategies and/or carrying out operational tactics to achieve them)

Strategic Planning & Mapping during this phase, a strategic plan is developed to lay out the short- and long-term direction for the organization, and a “strategy map” is created, which distills the often-unwieldy strategic plan into a simple, visual depiction of this year’s plan. The strategy map is an important step in encouraging the organization to focus on the critical few priorities.

Top-Level Balanced Scorecard this tool takes the prioritization of the strategy map one step further, making the organization’s top objectives both visible and actionable by identifying ways to measure progress of the objectives against agreed-upon targets. This begins to take the Strategic Planning Process from what can be an academic into a tactical plan for achievement.

Cascading Balanced Scorecards where your organization builds a more comprehensive framework upon the foundation of the Top-Level Balanced Scorecard by creating layers of linked, related, but not identical versions of the Balanced Scorecard, down and across the organizational hierarchy. This results in organizational linkages and alignment to strategy, as well as a means for achieving cross-functional strategic goals.

IMPROVEMENT

Performance Improvement during this stage, your organization learns to systematically identify the root causes of critical performance gaps (made obvious through the cascaded Balanced Scorecard framework) and then execute improvement initiatives to permanently remove the root causes. By focusing improvement efforts on the priorities identified in the Balanced Scorecard framework, rather than on bubbled-up fire-drill issues, your organization learns to apply its valuable resources to the highest impact needs.

Scorecard Business Reviews where an organization’s business reviews transform from superficial examinations of stale reports into productive, real-time, scorecard-based reviews that allow executives and managers to drill down from high-level problem areas, across and through contributing factors to ensure root causes have corrective actions in place.

CONTROL

Process Management where leading, causal measures are identified, performance or process improvements are locked-in, and all information needed to manage the business process successfully and predictably are identified.

Employee Goal and Compensation Alignment where employees work with their supervisors to develop personal-level goals, such as training and development objectives that will contribute to departmental and organizational needs and strategy, rather than the typical employee development goals, which too often focus on an employee’s unrelated interests. Ideally these should be tied into incentive compensation programs, further emphasizing how an individual’s contribution impacts the organization’s top- and bottom-line performance.

Budget Integration where Strategy Execution is truly integrated with the day-to-day business operations and their financial foundations. This stage ensures that performance and process improvement projects deemed necessary for executing the current year’s strategy have the appropriate resources allocated.

As you can see, organizations cannot flip a switch and achieve Enterprise Strategy Execution overnight. Rather, it is much more of an evolutionary process, which must be approached in steps. Trying to tackle all of these areas at once is not feasible and rather counterproductive, since strategy execution requires the continual development of new skills and behaviors. But the good news is that each of these steps comes with incremental benefits. And an ongoing dedication to Enterprise Strategy Execution gives organizations the absolute best odds for long-term results.

Learn more about the specific tools, steps, and even history of strategy execution with the articles below, and visit ActiveStrategy.com for all of your strategy execution needs. No matter where you are on your own Strategy Execution evolution, we can help you improve your results faster.

Shilpa Kamath asked:


 

Global Strategy Framework- An illustration of Tata Steel.

 

Introduction: Most managers have to face the increasing globalisation of markets and competition.  That fact requires each company to decide whether it must become a worldwide competitor to survive. While deciding to go for globalization, the managers face two challenges. .  First, they need to figure out what a global strategy is. Then, when they know what to do, they have to get their organisations to make it happen. Developing a global strategy is complicated by the fact that there are at least five major dimensions of globalisation such as playing big in major markets, standardizing the core product, concentrating value- adding activities in a few countries, adopting uniform market positioning and marketing mix and integrating competitive strategy across countries.

 

Global strategy framework given by George.S. Yip, Pierre .M. Loewe and Michael .Y. Yoshino helps the manager to decide whether it should globalise a particular business and what sort of global strategy should it pursue.  The global strategy framework/audit involves seven steps as shown in chart-1.(shown at the end)

1.      Identify Strategic business unit to audit: This step involves identifying the particular business unit for which the company is planning for globalisation.

2.      Evaluate industry potential for globalisation: Managers should look first to the business’s industry. An industry’s potential for globalisation is driven by market, economic, environmental and competitive factors (see Chart 2 at the end of the paper) Market forces determine the customers’ receptivity to a global product; economic factors determine whether pursuing a global strategy can provide a cost advantage; environmental factors show whether the necessary supporting infrastructure is there; and competitive factors pro­vide a spur to action.

                                  Market factors like homogeneous market needs, global customers, shortening product life cycle, transferable brands and advertising and internationalising distribution channel determine the potential for global strategy. Factors like economies of scale in manufacturing and distribution, steep learning curve, significant differences in country costs determine the potential for global strategy from economic point of view. Environmental factors like falling transportation costs, govt policies and technology changes push for global strategy in some industries. Competitive interdependence among countries and global moves of competitors also affect the potential of an industry for global strategy.

3.  Evaluate current extent of globalization: The current extent of globalization of SBU under study is evaluated from five dimensions such as market participation, product standardization, activity concentration, marketing uniformity and integration of competitive moves.

                              Playing big in major markets - ­countries that account for a sizeable share of worldwide volume or where changes in technology or consumer tastes are most likely to start – brings benefits such as, larger volume over which to amortise development efforts and investments in fixed assets, ability to manage countries as one portfolio, including being able to exploit differences in position along the product life cycle, learning from each country, and being at the cutting edge of the product category by participating in the one or two major countries that lead development.

                                The core product can be standardized while customizing more superficial aspects of the offering. This will help the firm to enjoy the economies of scale relating to production.

                               Instead of repeating every activity in each country, a pure global strat­egy provides for concentration of activities in just a few countries. For example. fundamental research is conducted in just one country, com­mercial development in two or three countries, manufacturing in a few countries, and core marketing pro­grams developed at regional centres, while selling and customer service take place in every country in the network. The benefits include gaining economies of scale and lever­aging the special skills or strengths of particular countries.

                               The more uniform the market positioning and marketing mix, the more the company can save in the cost of developing marketing strat­egies and programs. Again it is easy to manage one or two brand than having several brand names.

                                 Instead of making competitive de­cisions in a country without regard to what is happening in other coun­tries, a global competitor can take an integrated approach. Another benefit of integrating competitive strategy is the ability of a company to cross-subsidise. This in­volves utilising cash generated in a profitable, high-market-share country to invest aggressively in a strategically important but low-market-share coun­try.

4. Identify strategic need for change in the extent of globalisation:  From the previous analysis, a firm’s extent of globalisation is compared with the industry potential. In case the firm’s extent of globalisation is less than industry potential, there is a need for global strategy for that firm. Then the next issue would be to check whether the firm has the internal ability to implement such global strategy.

5. Evaluate organisational factors:  Organisational factors can support or undercut a business’s attempt to globalise. Therefore, taking a close look at how the organisation will affect the relative difficulty of globalisation is essential. Four factors affect the ability of an organisation to develop and implement global strategy: organisation structure, man­agement processes, people and cul­ture (see chart 3 at the end of this paper)

    

 a) Organisational structure:

·          Centralisation of global authority: One of the most effective ways to develop and implement a global strategy is to centralise authority, so all units of the business around the world report to a common sector head. In a company pursuing a global strategy, the business focus should dominate the coun­try focus.

·         Domestic/ International split: A common structural barrier to global strategy is an organisational split between domestic and international divisions. The international division oversees a group of highly autonomous country subsidiaries, each of which manages several distinct businesses. A global strategy for any one of these businesses can then be coordinated only at the CEO level.

         b) Management processes: The appro­priate processes can even substitute to some        extent for the appropriate structure..

·         Cross Country coordination: Pro­viding cross-country co-ordination is a       common way to make up for the lack of a direct report­ing structure.

·         Global Planning: Too often stra­tegic plans are developed sep­arately for each country and are not aggregated globally for each business across all coun­tries. This makes it difficult to understand the business’s com­petitive position worldwide and to develop an integrated strategy against competitors who plan on a global basis.

·         Global budgeting:  Similarly, coun­try budgets need to be consol­idated into a global total for each product line to aid the allocation of resources across product lines.

·         Global performance review and compensation: Rewards, especially bonuses, need to be set in a way that reinforces the com­pany’s global objectives.

·         International groups and forums: Holding international forums al­lows exchange of information and building of relationships across countries. This in turn makes it easier for country na­tionals to gain an understanding of whether the differences they perceive between their home country and others are real or imagined. It also facilitates the development of common products and the co-ordination of marketing approaches.

  c) People: Being truly global also involves using people in a different way from that of a multinational firm.

·         Use foreign nationals: High-po­tential foreign nationals need to gain experience not only in their home country, but also at head­quarters and in other countries. This practice has three benefits: broadening the pool of talent available for executive positions; demonstrating the commitment of top management to internationalisation; and giving talented individuals an irreplaceable de­velopment opportunity.

·         State global intentions: The se­nior management of a company that wants to go global needs to constantly restate that inten­tion and to act accordingly.

     d) Culture: Culture is the most visible aspect of organisation. If the company lacks global identity and has strong national identity, then it will face difficulty in designing global products and programmes.  A high level of autonomy for local business can also be a barrier to globalisation.

6.  Identify organisational ability to implement globalisation:  From the internal or organisational factor analysis, the firms ability to implement global strategy has to be identified.

 

 

 

7. Diagnose scope and direction of required strategy and organisational changes:  From the above analysis, it will be clear whether the firm can implement global strategy or not? What are the changes required in the organisation to implement global strategy?

      

 Illustration of Tata steels global strategy with the use of global strategy framework:

 

1. Identify business unit: Amongst the various SBU of Tata groups, I have selected Tata steel company (with special reference to their take over of Corus) as the SBU for the study of global strategy framework.

2. Evaluate Industry potential for globalization:  Market factors pushed for globalization. The market needs for steel was homogeneous and they had global customers. Because of homogeneity of needs, the brands and advertising were transferable.                                                                                                                                                                         

                             Economic factors were also favourable for globalization. Because of standardization of core products, the company was able to enjoy economies of scale in manufacturing. Since the company is ninety nine years old, they also enjoy the benefit of steep learning curve. Again, the raw material cost in U.K. is high. This can be offset by sourcing from India, where raw materials are comparatively cheaper.

                              Environmental factors increased the potential for global strategy. Since Corus had good sales network at various countries, the transportation costs of Tata steel will be reduced. Again, government policies like easing foreign currency restrictions both in UK and India were favourable for global strategy.

                                   Global moves of competitor i.e. Mittal acquiring Arcelor also forced the Tata steel to go for global strategy.

 

 

3. Evaluate current extent of globalization: The current extent of globalization is measured under 5 dimensions.

·    Market participation: Tata steel has sales in various countries like USA, Srilanka, Nepal, Shanghai etc but it lacked global identity or image.

·    Product standardization: The basic product was standardized throughout the world. At final stages the product was customized as per the requirements.

·    Activity concentration: Tata steels technological and integration, finance, strategy etc were concentrated only in India whereas the manufacturing activities were dispersed in India, USA, UK, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia etc. Trading was done in Bangladesh, Srilanka, Nepal, South Africa, Hong Kong, etc.

·    Marketing uniformity: The market positioning and marketing mix strategy were uniform throughout the world.

·    Integration of competitive moves: Tata steel has taken an integrated approach to global competitors. They have tough competition with Mittal steels in almost all countries.

3. Identify strategic need for change in the extent of globalization: From the previous analysis, Tata steel concluded that its extent of globalization was significantly lower than the industry potential and lower than its competitor’s global strategy. The Mittal Arcelor is ranked number one in steel industry in the world whereas the Tata steel ranked fifty sixth (before acquiring Corus). Furthermore, the industry potential for Tata steel had a strong need to develop a more global strategy. The next issue was whether Tata steel would be able to implement such a strategy.

5. Evaluate organisational / internal factors: To internal ability of Tata steel to implement global strategy is tested under the following factors:

·    Structure: The head quarter of Tata steel was located in India. The five main functions such as technological and integration, finance, strategy, corporate relation and communication and global minerals were centralized. While the production, selling and distribution was decentralized and the divisions heads were given autonomy to take decisions.

·    Management processes: The management processes were favourable for global strategy. Since the strategy and corporate communication was centralized, there was well cross- border co-ordination.

·    People: There were no foreign nationals working in India either at corporate or divisional levels. There were many foreign nationals overseas, but these were mostly in their home countries and there was little movement between international and domestic jobs. But the leader Ratan Tata, through his action and statements had a global approach.

·    Culture: Tata steel had a strong Indian national identity than a global identity. But some SBU of Tata group like Tetley Tea, Taj group of Hotels had created global identity.

 

6. Identify organizational ability to implement globalization: Tata steel had the ability to implement globalization because of its rich experience of 99 years of running a business successfully in India. Hence it had the ability to acquire big steel company like Corus.

7. Diagnose scope and direction of required changes: The most important change, the Tata steel has to do is to encourage the transfer of people between nations. According to IISI data, the average hourly rate of pay in UK steel was 6 times that of Brazil and 10 times that of India. So by movement of people, the company can reduce the cost and strengthen its competitive advantage of low cost leadership.

                                Tata groups in foreign countries should blend into the adopted corporate culture. For better brand visibility, more Tata companies will have to go abroad and learn to flourish abroad.

 

Conclusion:  The global strategy framework provides a relatively simple and quick way to get answers to some of the most complicated questions facing corporate management today. It also greatly facilitates the undertaking of the strategy development phase that follows, because it has identified the major thrusts that are needed. Furthermore, it has the potential for avoiding major errors such as a move towards globalization when none is warranted. Finally it sensitizes the organization to the issues and to the commitments needed if it really decides to compete globally.

                           

 Bibliography:



George .S.Yip, Pierre.M. Loewe, Michael .Y.Yoshino, “How to take your company to global market”, Columbia journal of world business, 1988.

Pocha Jehangir, “Tatas Titan”, Business world, Jan 14th 2008.

Singh Piya, “Eyes on the World”, Business world, Jan 14th 2008.



 

Websites:

      www.google.com

      www.tatassteel.com

      www.corus.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andrew Carey asked:


Why conduct a business strategy audit?

Nearly all the major initiatives undertaken by corporate executives today are called “strategic”. With everything having high strategic importance, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the many priorities and imperatives that are initiated in organisations. When everything is clearly strategic, often nothing strategic is clear. When everything is designated as a high priority, there are, in reality, no priorities at all.

However, when the overall strategic direction is clearly understood by everyone in your organisation, the following benefits occur:

organisational capabilities will be aligned to support the achievement of your strategy resources will be allocated to different business processes in priority order - according to the importance of that process and its contribution to competitive advantage your company or organisation can excel in the market place or in its business/commercial sector.

 

The purpose of a strategy audit is to arm managers with the tools, information, and commitment to evaluate the degree of advantage and focus provided by their current strategies. An audit produces the data needed to determine whether a change in strategy is necessary and exactly what changes should be made.

Defining a Strategy Audit

A strategy audit involves assessing the actual direction of a business and comparing that course to the direction required to succeed in a changing environment. A company\’s actual direction is the sum of what it does and does not do, how well the organisation is internally aligned to support the strategy, and how viable the strategy is when compared to external market, competitor and financial realities. These two categories, the internal assessment and the external or environmental assessment, make up the major elements of a strategy audit.

The outline that follows is derived from The Business Strategy Audit (see References). It\’s intended to give you a clear idea of how to set about conducting a self-assessment audit in your own organisation, without the need for any additional training or external consultancy support. But note that this outline does not include the range of Questionnaires and Checklists and the detailed guidance to be found in the full, 124-page Audit.



Part 1 ~ The External Environmental Assessment

A conventional corporate mission is to provide distinct products and services to customers at a value superior to that offered by competitors. Without a strategy, valuable resources will be diluted, the work of employees will be unfocused, and distinctiveness will not be achieved. The external environment assessment provides any business with a critical external link between its competitors, customers, and the products/services it offers.

The fundamental reason for examining an organisation\’s environment in the process of clarifying strategy can be summarised thus:

Ensure that the company is meeting the needs evident in the environment Prevent others from meeting those needs in a better way Create or identify ways to meet future or emerging needs.

 

The success or failure of a company often depends on its ability to monitor changes in the environment and meet the needs of its customers and prospective customers.

An organisation\’s business environment is never static. What is viewed as uniqueness or distinctiveness today will be viewed as commonplace tomorrow as new competitors enter the industry or change the environment by modifying the rules by which companies compete. Consequently, an effective strategy will do more than help a company to stay in the game. It will help it to establish new rules for the game that favour that company. Successful companies do more than simply understand their environments. They also influence and shape the circumstances around them. Companies that fail to influence their environments automatically concede the opportunity to do so to their competitors.

Steps in conducting an environmental assessment



Step 1: Understand the external environment at a macro level

The first step in the environmental assessment is to develop a basic understanding of the trends and issues that will significantly change, influence, and affect the industry. The overall industry understanding comes from looking at the elements that influence the environment.

These elements include:

Capital markets Industry capacity Technological factors Pressure from substitutes Threat of new entrants Economic factors Political factors Regulatory factors Geographic factors Social factors

 

A useful framework to understand these issues comes from answering the following questions. They should be posed directly when used in an interview, and indirectly when analysing data:

What is the long-term viability of the industry as a whole, and how do capital markets react to new developments? What trends could change the rules of the game? Who are the industry leaders? What are they doing? Why? What are the key success factors in the industry? What developments could allow a company to change the rules of the game? Five years from now, how will winners in the industry look and act? What is the reward (and/or cost) of being a winner/loser within the industry? Where has the industry come from?

 

Step 2: Understand the industry/sector components in detail

Industry/sector components are normally broken down as follows: competitors, customers and stakeholders. Questions that should normally be asked of each key competitor include:

BUSINESS REVIEW

Strategy Issues:

What is the strategy of each competitor? Where do they appear to be heading? What is their business emphasis? Do they compete on quality, cost, speed or service? Are they niche or global players?

 

Capabilities:

What do they do better than anyone else? Where are they weaker than others? Where are they the same as others?

 

Business Objectives:

Who are their primary customers? What types of business do they not do or say no to? Who are their major partners? Why are they partnering? What do they gain from it? What are they doing that is new or interesting?

 

FINANCIAL REVIEW

Financial Strength - Internal:

How much cash does each competitor generate annually? What are the drivers behind their financial success (from a cash perspective)? How do they allocate resources (funds)? How fast are they growing and in what areas?

 

Strength as Perceived by Capital Markets:

Are competitors resource constrained or do they have strong financial backing? Is this perception consistent with the internal analysis? Why or why not? How has the company performed in the financial markets? Why? What constraints/opportunities do they have with respect to financial markets? Why?

 

ORGANISATION REVIEW

Top Management:

Has management kept the company at the forefront of the industry? Why or why not? Are the key players seen to be moving the company forward?

 

Organisation:

Is the company centralised or decentralised? Does the corporate parent act as a holding company or as an active manager? Is the organisation perceived as being lean and able to get things done?

 

People:

How many people are employed? Is the company over-or under-staffed? Are people managed to achieve mainly business objectives, human objectives or some of both? How does this affect the company? What skills are emphasised during recruitment?

 

Culture:

Is the culture results-oriented? Bureaucratic? Flexible?

 

Similar lists of questions should be developed for customers and stakeholders (or see the full Audit for ready-made questionnaires).

Step 3: Integrate the components into an environmental picture

Once the findings of the stakeholder analysis, customer analysis and competitor analysis (above) have been collected, audit team members should step back and integrate the data. Integrating the different components will help the team to understand the overall environment in which the business operates.

This integration should take place at two levels: assessing where the industry is heading and the likely impact of that direction on the company, and combining the organisational assessment with the environmental assessment.

The Business Strategy Audit offers a detailed framework for analysing this data. In brief, it should highlight significant changes in the environment, and the impact of those changes on the company\’s competitive position within the industry. It should address the fundamental question of how the company can influence its environment in the future, and what the business will need to look like if it is to thrive in the future.

In addition, the analysis should highlight the requirements and capabilities that are needed within the company to meet external demands. These requirements and needs should then be matched up with the current capabilities outlined in the organisation assessment. This will enable the team to determine the overall alignment of the company\’s strategy to its environment.

Part 2 ~ The Organisational Assessment

Once the company\’s environment has been examined and analyzed, managers should consider the qualities and characteristics of the organisation itself that influence what can be accomplished in terms of strategy. This section is about organisational assessment. The steps shown here will provide insights into the effectiveness of the company\’s current strategy, and provide guidelines for increasing strategic effectiveness.

Strategy Clarification. Strategy clarification helps the leadership team determine what business they are in, the direction of the business, and framework or criteria for making strategic decisions in the future. If people at any level of a business are unclear about any of these three areas, it is difficult for them to focus their attention, cooperate with other teams, and organise their efforts to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Viability and Robustness. Measuring viability and robustness helps a leadership team test strategies and ideas against future world scenarios to determine whether the strategies can be achieved and sustained. By looking at both market and financial viability and robustness in different scenarios, a management team can see what will create advantage in the future and what key measures need to be implemented to monitor changes in business conditions. Business Processes. The term business process refers to the overall work flow within a company and includes elements such as product design, manufacturing, and delivery. A good process analysis will help a leadership team to see what must be done given the company\’s strategy, and how those processes can be improved. Capabilities. Capabilities are bundles of separate skills required to deliver the products or services that give a business competitive advantage. There are two parts of a capability assessment. First, the capabilities needed to execute the strategy must be determined. Second, the current level of ability in terms of those capabilities must be assessed. Without knowing what capabilities should be focused on and improved, competitive advantage will be difficult to achieve. Organisation Design and Resourcing. This part of the analysis looks at alignment issues between the environment, the strategy, the skills required to achieve that strategy, and the organisation structure. During this step, a management team can design an organisation that aligns systems in a way that will allow them to execute a strategy. Unless the systems within a business are aligned to improve effectiveness or efficiency, strategy statements are merely plaques on the wall that are seldom realised. Culture. Culture refers to the set of shared values that influence behaviour and direction over time. The style of management and the beliefs and assumptions commonly held by people in the organisation must be determined in order to ensure alignment and execution of the strategy.

 

Having completed each of these assessments, they must be integrated by the audit team. In this process, audit team members should attempt to answer one fundamental question: Is our strategy in alignment with the external environment?

To answer this broad question, the following issues should be addressed:

Do our capabilities match our customer requirements? Do we offer something required by our customers that is better than the offerings of our competitors? How are customer demands changing? How are competitors changing? How are our internal capabilities evolving to keep pace with those changes?

 

Depending on the answers to these questions, the team can implement the changes dictated by the audit. In making these changes, three issues should be considered:

Structure follows strategy - This means that current organisational boundaries and structures should not be allowed to determine the selection of a competitive strategy. Rather, the environmental and organisational assessments that you have just conducted should determine and drive strategy selection.

Plans for change must be widely owned - Those people ultimately responsible for implementing strategy (typically front-line employees) should be consulted for their ideas about what changes should be made and how they should be made. Otherwise, very little change is likely to happen.

Implementation should start with what is core to gaining advantage - In other words, start with core business processes, \’pick the low hanging fruit\’ first, make those changes that will make the most visible difference.

In addition, it may be useful to know that the following are the most common mistakes made by teams conducting business strategy audits:

Expecting all data to be equally useful Do nothing with the audit findings Failing to link other support systems (rewards, administration, etc.) to strategy Not thinking strategically about what processes and capabilities to keep in-house and what to outsource Failing to prioritise those core processes that must be world-class Failing to match internal capabilities with customer requirements Failing to communicate audit findings and strategy changes to people throughout the organisation is a clear and simple language