The Strategy Execution System – Aligning your employees to your strategy

Kaplan and Norton have published a series of articles on different elements of the strategy execution process since 1992 covering Balanced Scorecards, Strategy Maps, and the Office of Strategy Management as well as a number of books where they have shared invaluable information on how companies can improve their execution processes as part of an overall system. James Creelman has posted an excellent series of articles which charts this over a 25 year period (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).

The overall strategy execution system that Kaplan and Norton developed, documented in The Execution Premium – Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage, has six stages:

  • Develop the strategy
  • Translate the strategy
  • Align the organisation
  • Plan operations
  • Monitor and learn
  • Test and adapt

In stage 3, aligning the organisation, it is important to focus on aligning business units, support units and employees. The 40-minute video below focuses on aligning the employees to your strategy. There is a great anecdote around communicating the Balanced Scorecard at 17:00 minutes. Just to let you know that there is a bit of a synch issue between slides and sound, but that shouldn’t spoil an excellent and informative presentation.

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About the author

Strategy Execution Evangelist at i-nexus. 20+ years in marketing and strategy roles within the telecommunications sector

10+ years with Ericsson, previously Head of Strategy Programme Office for Western and Central Europe, responsible for driving the strategic business planning process across 16 countries.

Substantial experience with the issues involved across the entire execution process in large enterprises from planning, alignment, delivery, measurement, governance and communication.