The July/August issue of Harvard Business Review has a good article on strategy by Michael Mankins and Richard Steele. It is titled “Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance,” and hits on some issues that I think are important. According to their research (in the corporate sector), the actual performance of companies turns out to be only an average of only 63% of what the strategies said performance would be. That’s quite a gap! The secret to closing that gap, they point out unsurprisingly, is by focusing both on strategy AND execution. Two of their findings are particularly interesting to me, but I’m just going to post on one of them tonight.
They found that performance bottlenecks are frequently invisible to top management. Leaders come up with the strategy, but if (when) it doesn’t work as planned, they actually don’t have “clear information on how and why performance is falling short,” so it is “impossible for top management to take appropriate corrective action” (p. 68). Their solution lies in continuously monitoring performance. Okay, easier said than done. I thought it was interesting, however, that in their examples, senior managers in large corporations were reviewing organizational performance WEEKLY! These sessions forced everyone to “live the details of execution.”
I think this discipline is often weak among associations. Part of the problem is that we get hung up on metrics. I grant you it is easier to come up with performance metrics when you are producing and selling widgets. But even if we came up with some vague metrics or perhaps entirely subjective, qualitative ones, would anyone meet weekly to discuss them? More often people dread weekly staff meetings, and those mostly recount simply WHAT HAPPENED in the last week, not whether it had an impact on performance.
This article makes me think about the way organizations have meetings. How do you take the “data” of what happens every day and turn it into “information” that is actually useful to decision makers? Then how do you make sure that information gets where it needs to go?
