Aligning and Executing Your Strategy toTransform and Sustain Your Business

Hi, I'm Doug Saarel, and welcome to my "Musings from the Mountaintop and beyond". In the following commentaries, my intention is to provide practical advice and to encourage discussion with readers on how to create and sustain an adaptive enterprise; one capable of successfully navigating the changes facing all of us in our modern knowledge-based and technology-driven universe. My emphasis will be on developing and executing effective leadership, strategy, and infrastructure, all within an integrated systems framework. These elements cannot be separated because, in practice, they are all closely related. The following is illustrative.

Recent Research Results are Alarming:

• More than 50% of down-sizings have resulted in increased costs.
• Eighty percent of process re-engineering projects have failed to meet their objectives.
• The majority of quality programs have not substantially improved quality over time.
• Big projects fail at an astonishing rate; they consume tremendous resources, yet frequently deliver disappointing returns, by some estimates well over half of the time. One middle manager at a top pharmaceutical company stated,"I've been on dozens of task teams in my career, and I've never seen one that actually produced a result".
• Note: Harvard Business School recently put out an "innovation alert" indicating that over 70% of innovation initiatives have failed to achieve their goals.

The Reasons are Obvious, but the Solutions are not:

• American business leaders approach improvement initiatives piecemeal.
• Rather than treat their enterprises as organic systems, they focus on creating the best individual pieces which then don't fit together.
• Leaders do not take the time to develop the necessary management structures, support systems, and organizational competencies to be successful.
• They often don't invest in the right projects and execute those projects right.

During my many years of business experience in industry (Johnson & Johnson, The Cleveland Clinic, PepsiCo, Squibb, and as a senior officer of The Coca-Cola Company), as a Chairman of the Board of Overseers and a moderator of executive programs for world leaders at The Aspen Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School's SEI Center for Advanced Management Studies, and having consulted for fifteen years, I've had the good fortune to develop and try out several tools that have been successful in helping companies transform themselves into enterprises that have created sustainable competitive advantage. It is my intention to share those with you in our deliberations.

Please let me know of your interest and the two or three issues that keep you awake at night.