Strategy: Achieving Outcomes That Add Value

By K Em

Anyone who has worked in an organisation has either seen or been a part of the process of creating the next 3 to 5 year strategic plan. This is inevitably followed by lots of fanfare to launch the new strategy.

However, once this is done, try asking people at all levels throughout the business, what they think the organisation will look like in three years’ time - given the strategy will be successful. A lot of people won’t be able to answer that question, or you will get wildly different versions of the expected future.

Senior leadership can get so wrapped up in the process of creating a strategy, that they lose sight of the fact that they failed to come up with a future state that forms the basis of good strategy. There is a huge blind spot that stems from a lack of understanding of the fundamentals.

The everyday workings of a business (BAU) are controlled by processes, controls, etc. to deliver the expected outputs. With practice, people get good at delivering these somewhat repetitive outputs.

Getting those same people to deliver new value, and creating an environment where they can do this rapidly and effectively, is going to require you to do something different.

This book explores some of the elements that can help your organisation actually achieve something of significant value from its strategy, where outcomes become the greater focus as opposed to just outputs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: K Em
• Release date: Sep 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005043018

Book preview

Strategy: Achieving Outcomes that add Value

Published by K Em at Smashwords

Copyright 2022 K Em

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Introduction

There are two main reasons why strategies fail and they should come as no surprise to anyone.

1 - The strategy was poor to begin with

2 - The organisation cannot execute the strategy

If your strategy is poor to begin with, then regardless of how much you try to sell it to the organisation, people will not believe in it, especially the talented employees that you need on-board, and you won’t get the effort and focus required to execute it.

There are lots of potential issues contributing to the inability of an organisation to execute on strategy. This book provides some ideas on how the execution of strategy can be improved, along with a discussion of the fundamentals of strategy – something that will help to cut through all the noise and distractions on the topic and focus back in on what is needed for good strategy.

Table of Contents

A strategy has to create value

What is strategy and what is it trying to achieve

Outputs, outcomes, and impacts

What is ‘value’?

Future state

How it all goes wrong from the start

Strategy development - creating the path to the future state

Successfully executing to a future state

Being strategic

Leadership

What type of leader will ensure a strategy is executed

You cannot know exactly what the future looks like

Just start

Executing rapidly and creating momentum

The importance of a collaborative environment

Effective teams

Freedom

Effective management

Operating with context

Feedback

Poor behaviour will destroy potential for value creation

Performance measurement

Your scarcest resources

Balancing strategy and BAU

Corporate values and behaviours

Resourcing the strategy

Getting the skills and knowledge required

Consider potential impacts from HR processes

Optimisation and waste removal

Financial management

In the end

A strategy has to create value

One of the biggest reasons why strategies fail is that they were poorly conceived to begin with.

A strategy starts with an achievable future state that people in the organisation can see the value of.

You can fool some people in an organisation with a poor strategy and the right narrative, but the discerning employees will see straight through something that has no real value to it, something that is not going to take the organisation anywhere.

So, how do poor strategies get developed and then get approved by a governing body such as a Board? One of the issues is that a lot of people don’t have a good model for understanding the fundamentals of strategy and its purpose.

What is strategy and what is it trying to achieve?

To keep a business moving forward, you need to work out what new value you want the business to achieve and how you keep people focussed on actually achieving