How to link where your company is headed with what it does best.
“We are all in the gutter,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “but some of us are looking at the stars.” That is the nature of strategy through execution. You operate deep in the weeds, managing countless day-to-day tasks and transactions. At the same time, you keep a steady gaze on your company’s long-term goals — and on ways you can stand out from your competitors.
Having a close link between strategy and execution is critically important. Your strategy is your promise to deliver value: the things you do for customers, now and in the future, that no other company can do as well. Your execution occurs in the thousands of decisions made each day by people at every level of your company.
Quality, innovation, profitability, and growth all depend on having strategy and execution fit together seamlessly. If they don’t fit — if you can’t deliberately align them in a coherent way — you risk operating at cross-purposes and losing your focus. This problem is all too common. In a recent Strategy& global survey, 700 business executives were asked to rate their company’s top leaders in terms of their skill at strategy creation and at execution. Only 8 percent were credited as being very effective at both.
Strategy&, the strategy consulting business of PwC, has been studying the relationship between strategy and execution for years. We have found that the most iconic enterprises — companies such as Apple, Amazon, Danaher, IKEA, Starbucks, and the Chinese appliance manufacturer Haier, all of which compete successfully time after time — are exceptionally coherent. They put forth a clear winning value proposition, backed up by distinctive capabilities, and apply this mix of strategy and execution to everything they do.
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