Strategy Implementations, like most other initiatives, Mostly Fail. Some thoughts…

My good friend and associate, Robin Speculand, has been working closely with organizations on the implementation of strategy. His research is clear:

MOST STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATIONS FAIL – 9 OF 10

It’s as simple as that. There are a lot of causes but it mostly is a failure to integrate the strategy with the desired behavioral changes throughout the organization. It is easy to talk about it; it is hard to accomplish it successfully.

Robin recently completed his international survey and shares some interesting results. I just got the email announcing its publication so I share it and some of his key findings here and will comment more extensively on it in future posts when I return from my travels.

Key Findings include:

• 80% of leaders feel their company is good at crafting strategy but only 44% at its implementation and only 2% are confident that they will achieve 80-100% of their strategy’s objectives
• Most leaders allocate more time to implementing strategy than creating
• An overwhelming number believe that their bonus should be linked to the successful implementation of the strategy
• 70% of leaders spend less than one-day a month reviewing strategy
• Leaders believe that only 5% of employees have a basic understanding of the company strategy

This year’s survey, the 12th year of his research, continues to show that things could be done differently and better.

It has involved online responses for the first time as well as over 130 interviews. The majority of organizations have over 10,000 employees and their headquarters are predominantly in the US and Singapore, with 62% of the companies being multi-nationals, 21% were from the Public Sector and 17% local (Singapore).

The main industry this year was from IT followed by Financial Institutions, Government and Pharmaceutical. The main participants in the survey were middle and senior managers with a handful of supervisors.

You can see a slideshow of the results at  http://www.slideshare.net/SpeculandRobin/strategy-implementation-survey-results-2012
until the end of February, 2013.

Robin has been using my flagship team building game, The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine as an integral part of his engagement and alignment process for a dozen years. As George Peppard said in the old A-Team TV show, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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