Execution: The Biggest Challenge for Businesses Today

by Pamela Wasley

According to the 2007 Conference Board study, the top pain points for CEOs were excellence in execution and consistent execution on company strategy. However, I am still hearing from CEOs that building an organization that can effectively plan and execute, while at the same time, overcoming the inevitable surprises in business still remains one of the biggest challenges today.

Consider the following as you plan for the future.

The world is moving much faster today and the way the world is at this moment in time will not be the same a year from now. We are living in an exponential world. An exponential rate of change put on a graph would not appear as a straight line but as a curve that continually gets steeper and steeper.

Here are some examples of how fast the world really is changing.

• In 1992, there were 1 million internet devices...In 2006, there were 600 billion internet devices being used.
  
  
• In 2006, there were 2.7 billion searches every month on Google... today there are 39 billion searches every month
  
  
• 1 in 8 couples who married last year...met online.
  
  
• Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users
  TV...13 years
  The Internet...4 years.
  
  
• The amount of technical data doubles every 2 years. By 2010, it will double every 72 hours.
  
  
• Ebay was founded in 1996...today its revenues are $6 billion.
  
  
• For students starting a 4 year technical college degree, half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their junior year.
  
  
• My Space has over 200 million users making it the equivalent of the 5th largest country in the world. Just today...230,000 more visitors signed up. However, today I read that Facebook was gaining quickly on MySpace in traffic so who will be the dominant social site one year fromnow? Will it be MySpace, Facebook or perhaps even some other company? Would you like to venture a guess?

Got your attention now?

Whatever challenges your company is experiencing today, these challenges will be different and bigger tomorrow so it's vital that you take control and prepare now. But how?

As Gary Harpst clearly states in his new book Six Disciplines. Execution Revolution, "Leaders who build organizations with the ability to balance strategy with strong execution over long periods of time achieve enduring excellence."

Studies completed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in The Strategy Focused Organization, Harvard Business School Press, have shown that 90 percent of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution.

More than 64 percent of C-level executives from 250 mid-sized to large companies in the United States and Europe have said that being able to execute, to react quickly to changing business opportunities and technologies is critical for their success.  Yet nearly 80 percent of them said this is nearly impossible because of internal silos of people who continue to do things their own way, conflicting organizational activities, redundant processes and lack of buy-in and collaboration throughout the organization. (Ralph Welborn and Vince Kasten, Get it Done! A Blueprint for Business Execution, Wiley, 2006.)

Execution is a universal problem and it is not easy by any stretch of the imagination.  I know as we recently went through our yearly strategic planning session, setting our goals and action plan for the coming year.  The easy part was the planning stage with execution the hardest part yet to come.  However, Harpst, in his new book, puts everything into a methodology of actionable steps to show you how to become better at execution and to move your business to the next level of growth.

1. Strategy (Decide what is important)
2. Plan (Set goals that lead)
3. Organize (Align systems)
4. Execute (Work the plan)
5. Innovate (Be creative purposely)
6. Learn (Step back, review, adjust)

Your plan should consist of a repeatable methodology that is measurable and revisited every quarter to make sure you are on track and to see if any part of the plan needs tweaking due to something you have learned along the way. 

Take control of your destiny and success today by perfecting your planning and execution process.  Because if you don't; the world, as fast as it is changing, might just leave you behind.

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The Human Capital Institute "Gaining a Business Edge through Interim Executive Management".

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