No doubt strategic thinking has a great importance for the overall growth of the organization. As very well said “Men without vision shall perish” which holds so true about every organization too. Having a strategic thinking that maps to the vision is an absolute necessity. I don’t think if a company or group can ever succeed if it lacks either the vision or a strategy.
I have read and observed that many times companies and divisions that have all the required strategy but still fail. They have an executive team which churns our great strategies but still they fail. In my personal experience the disconnect between thinking and execution is the key reason. What was thought was not relayed well and executed in accordance to the strategy at all.
Many times I have seen the executives having a thought process that thinking is their game. Once they are done just throw the strategy map to the lower management. Let the lower management have a plan to execute on the strategy.
Now comes the turn of the lower management and they start executing. Many projects are brought to life and many changed based on their limited understanding. Priorities are assigned to all the projects again based on their interpretation of the strategy map. Not just the wrong interpretation of strategy but also other factors like their own technology priorities, sale priorities, client priorities, priorities of the respective group etc.
Nothing wrong with this except that there comes a disconnect! Strategy makers do not understand how the projects in execution fulfill the strategy and match to the vision of the company while the execution teams keeps on spending huge amount of effort on projects that are not aligned strategically to the vision of the company. A huge amount of resources are wasted on strategy and execution in this manner.
I know nobody is trying to do it with an intent to go on a wrong path but still it happens every time very year. Just in USA, companies spend billions of dollars on training the top level management about the best strategies etc. But every year less than 20% strategies are successfully put to implementation.
How to fix this issue? Any thoughts?Any comments?