Overview

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Strategic Management Challenges

• Strategy Execution -- Execution has received great attention over the past decade as indicated by the popularity of execution consultants, seminars, and books like Execution by Bossidy & Charan and the balanced scorecard series produced by Kaplan & Norton. Execution challenges are understood and effective solutions have been developed for deliberate strategies.
• Strategy Formation -- This has received less attention than execution. BAi's assertion is that formation has not received sufficient attention. There is logical reasoning and strong empirical evidence to indicate that poorly made strategy is the greatest risk factor to business performance and survival, not strategy execution.
• Context – The implications of context are often unappreciated and too often ignored. The pertinent factors for every organization are unique, as well as those of each business within the organization. Without an effective context definition, management misses out on a true understanding of the problems and opportunities they are faced with.
• Complexity – Complexity is in some ways the most challenging. It is the growing recognition that highly successful organizations are complex systems with synergistic elements. Complexity theory reveals challenges and offers solutions to some of strategy's most difficult issues.
• Competency – In a world of ongoing creative destruction, requiring the continual assessment of strategy viability and renewal, strategy development can not be an event, it must be a management discipline.
• Knowledge – For knowledge to be used and developed effectively, it must have a home. Quality has organized bodies of knowledge such as Baldrige for excellence and ISO for compliance. Strategic management has no such recognized framework to organize and further develop the body of knowledge.

Execution