The most successful companies have discovered a way to consistently achieve strategic results by bridging the inherent gap between their conceptual objectives and the practical efforts required to achieve them. They’ve institutionalized a set of practices that ensures a high frequency of successful outcomes.
The key is to start at the end. As crazy as this sounds, high-performing organizations begin by envisioning what their desired future state will look like. They define a broad set of objectives – often transformative to the business – that serve as a directional guide for what will need to be accomplished. But beyond strategy, what sets successful companies apart from others is that they immediately translate their vision into a set of specific and actionable initiatives, each assigned a measurement goal, business champion and timeline for completion (Step1 below).
High-performing organizations add the project’s critical KPIs to their business dashboards for visibility and tracking. These initiatives become pervasive across the enterprise. They’re published and shared both broadly and deeply, and form the basis for regular management reviews (Step 3). When issues or roadblocks are encountered, these teams work collaboratively to make the necessary adjustments to get back on track. And outcomes are validated against objectives to make sure the original goals have been achieved.
Along the way corporate imperatives may change. As a natural part of regularly scheduled strategic reviews – done at least quarterly, the best performing companies embrace these situations by quickly making any required adjustments to goals, initiatives and actions in order to ensure alignment with the new vision (Step 4).