Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change

Lawrence Hbrebiniak's "Making Strategy Work" is billed as a comprehensive roadmap and process model for executing strategy. This is absolutely what this book contains. Giving excellent examples from top firms like GE and Dell, the author lists the processes to use in simple to complex business situations where the executive manager can lay out a plan to execute their business strategy. Executing strategy is by no means easy. This is why good managers get the top bucks. Along the way from plan to accomplishment are a number of difficult roadblocks. Not the least of these is communication. The chapter on coordination and communication follows the chapter on organizational structure. This is not by accident. A proper structure allows the flow of vital information down and up. First and foremost, however, is having the right strategy in place. A decision to fund a feeble project is not going to have a happy outcome, no matter how efficient the organization and clever the execution. Corporate culture is another important factor, and Professor Hrebiniak doesn't neglect to discuss in a very clear way how a corporate culture must be managed to effect a good strategic plan. If you look at some of the notable failures in the last 10 years in some Fortune 100 firms where change in strategy was vital, not a few of the lapses were due to a failure to assess and manage changes in the prevailing culture. The author links culture and behavior: shared values and norms--"The way we do things"; A common vision /Credo--"How we compete" "How we treat each other"; common goals and incentives-- and "Risk Taking and Innovation." The author points out how mergers and acquisitions are strongly affected by corporate culture and gives models for changing and reinforcing behavior. A start-to-finish case study of a merger/acquisition is included, a tremendous resource. I cannot think of another book that is more direct and to the point about this subject. This should be on the bookshelf of every manager in every organization, whether for profit or not-for-profit. Absolutely essential reading. Highly recommended. Joanna Daneman

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.

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.

Based on the experiences of managers, the book focuses on the knowledge, skills and capabilities managers need to execute strategy. It presents an integrated approach, presenting and detailing key execution decisions, incorporating central change-management issues. The final chapter shows how to apply the logic, insights, and guidance presented in this work. Of special note is that one chapter is devoted to motivation, incentives, and the control process encompassing accountability, responsibility and leadership. If you want a book to help guide turning your strategic plan into performance and profits, this book is right on target. Highly recommended.

I've read a lot of business books. Usually they all say the same thing. "Making Strategy Work" is different. Rather than focus on "strategy formulation" or on "execution", the book LINKS strategy formulation with execution. A professor at Wharton Business School, Larry Hrebiniak does an excellent job laying out the building blocks for assembling an execution-focused organization in simple language, and supplement his approach with numerous case examples. There are many important messages in the book, almost one on every page. This book is the missing link that makes a difference between successful strategy and one that fails. A very important guide for every CEO.