Planning for Success vs. Executing for Success
Organizations around the globe dedicate countless hours and significant resources to developing comprehensive business strategies in pursuit of one singular goal: success. So with such detailed focus given to strategic planning, why is it that most companies continually fall short of their intended objectives. Where's the leak? What's the difference between planning for success and realizing success? Execution.
Mg moves best practice, personal work habits to the teams in order to create "collective self discipline" and a unified execution capacity.
Business Need
Collaboration
The major trend within the last 10 years of business has been collaboration, openness, and the democratization of strategy and idea creation. All of these concepts have had strong, positive impacts on workforce efficiency and staff commitment. Another trend has been the increases in the speed of communication, which has created a new dynamism in many high performing companies and fueled economic change. These trends not only permeate business, but also impact students and home life such that there is "no place to hide" from these advancements. The end result is that Managers must embrace these concepts and harness them as positive forces within their organization.
There are, however, negative consequences from these trends in that our collective ability to execute is often negatively impacted. The same speed and openness displaces quality concentration time and distracts from our ability to prioritize. While we might have the tools to more quickly assign a task to a fellow coworker, we don't have the tools to ensure that they will make this task a priority for that staff member.
Additionally, staff can now often individually create initiatives that are aligned with the corporate vision and values, but what ensures that distractions will not get in the way of bring to life this great initiative. In short, why have these positive business trends not had an even more significant impact on work output?
Execution
The root cause of this “real output gap” comes from the fact that deciding "what to do" is a category of problem solving that benefits from a more democratic, less structured, and more creative working processes. Actually "doing the work efficiently", requires concise communications, clear delegation, and distraction free focus on what is important.
They are opposite work styles that must coexist simultaneously within any high performing companies. The revolution of the democratic, collaborative workplace must not be allowed to displace all the value of a traditional, hierarchical execution factory if we expect significant and long lasting improvement.
Companies that create great ideas must be able to execute through clear task definition, delegation, and distraction free priority execution. This less democratic and less sexy side of business results is a "self-evident" limitation in so many progressive companies.
