Turning great strategy into great performance

What percentage of the potential of a business strategy do you think CEO believe is delivered during implementation?

90%? 80%? 70%?…

A paper from the Harvard Business Review was sent to me by my friend Shawn Callahan at Anecdote.

In it, there research shows that on average CEO believe just 63% of the potential return of a strategy is realised through the implementation.

It is called the Strategy-to-Performance gap.

The main reasons identified for the gap are:

Inadequate or unavailable resources

Poorly communicated strategy

Actions required to execute not clearly defined

Unclear accountabilities for execution

Organisational silos and culture blocking execution

Inadequate performance monitoring

Inadequate consequences of rewards for failure or success

Poor senior leadership

Uncommitted leadership

Unapproved strategy

It is my belief that this applied as equally to business strategy as it does to marketing strategy and communications strategy.

How many times have you seen a communications or marketing strategy fall short of the promised potential?

Perhaps the problem is not the strategy, but the execution.