If we take care of the minutes, the years take care of themselves.

-Ben Franklin

Creating a winning strategy is hard. But harder still is making it work. Experts agree that strategies fail at a staggering rate — studies studies reveal the rate of failure may be as high as 90%.

In “Why Good Strategies Fail: Lessons For The C-Suite,” Peter Greenwood writes in The Economist that nearly two-thirds of CEOs interviewed admitted that “their firms often struggle to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and its day-to-day implementation.”

Closing The “Execution Gap”

In their brilliant book The 12 Week Year, Brian Moran and Michel Lennington argue that to close this "execution gap,” organizations need to realize that effective execution “does not happen monthly, quarterly or semi-annually; it happens daily, ultimately moment-by-moment.” Results are created by your actions, Moran and Lennington explain, and “the greatest predictor of your future results are your daily actions.”

Making Strategy Work

The late Lawrence Hbrebiniak (long-time professor emeritus at Wharton) wrote a definitive book on this challenge of Making Strategy Work. Hbrebiniak asks “if execution is central to success, why don’t more organizations develop a disciplined approach to it? Why don’t companies spend time developing and perfecting processes that help them achieve important strategic outcomes?...The simple answer, again, is that execution is extremely difficult.”

Where Focus Goes Energy Flows

One of the executives cited in Greenwood’s study for The Economist is Jeff Austin, VP of Strategy Planning for DuPont Pioneer. Austin explains, “where you have resources allocated really says what you have prioritized. Ensuring that the allocation process is aligned with strategic intent is critical.” In other words, where focus is flowing right now is a leading indicator of whether your team is oriented appropriately to implement your strategy. So, if you're a leader (of an organization, or a team), how do you know where strategic focus is right now? How often do you measure and validate whether today's (or this week's) focus is aligned to your priorities?

Once you’ve done the important (and difficult) work of formulating your strategy — which, as Professor Hrebiniak reminds us, is done by a small group of individuals — you need to do the even more critical work of implementing that strategy with an even larger group of individuals and teams. Overcoming the odds — remember, <90% of strategies fail — requires persistent and disciplined understanding of what's most important (we call this CLARITY), and then deliberate focus of effort and resources in the direction of those priorities (we call this COORDINATION). It also requires having visibility into how effectively your organization is following through on that focus. Moran and Lennington call this "scorekeeping," which is “an anchor to reality." In the timeless (and apt) words of Benjamin Franklin, “if we take care of the minutes, the years take care of themselves.”

We believe this is how progress really happens. This is how you close the gap between strategy and implementation.