Great strategy? Good Execution!

“Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.
-General Norman Schwartzkopf

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
-Winston Churchill

“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”
-General George S. Patton

“A half-baked strategy well executed will be superior to that marvelous strategy that isn’t very well executed.”
–Allan Gilmour, former Vice Chairman, Ford Motor

“Quality of execution is far more important than the idea.” -Barnett Helzberg, Helzberg Diamonds (bought by Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway)

Strategy shows up in Power Point decks, in corporate brochures, and to the delight of executives, in business publications with their names prominently attached. Great time and effort go into slicing and dicing markets, attempting to find sweet spots, and pontificating at the 100,000 foot level how to grow the biz.

Unfortunately, that which is often neglected is the execution. To unfortunate ends. As anyone reading at the grade school level can attest from the lines above, execution plays a central role to organizational success. This is true of not only military organizations, but those of a business bent as well.

Why then do so many, spend so much, for so long, on something which can yield so little? Particularly if the support and performance aren’t there? Because it’s sexy, that’s why. It’s more interesting to tell your neighbor that you’re a strategist rather than a manager or an operations grinder. And for these folks, by the time the chickens come home to roost, they can simply say that market conditions changed, requiring a change in strategy, and away they go.

As a rock solid PM, you cannot lose sight of the execution tree for the forest that is strategy. Many product lines fail to produce and firms fall because the execution was not present to support the strategy in the Power Point. In other words, without consistent execution, the greatest of strategies becomes expensive slide ware, vapor ware, or any other empty “ware” you care to call it.

Strategy… fine. Execution…. Required!