Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 408 pages
• Published by: Wharton School Publishing January 15, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 013146745X
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0131467453
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Weighs: 1.4 pounds

Product Review


From Kirkus Reports, February 10, 2005 Volume 2, Issue 1

Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change
By: Lawrence G. Hrebiniak
Publisher: Wharton School Publishing
Pub Date: January 2005

In what could be an great companion piece to either branding book mentioned this month, Wharton professor Hrebiniak deconstructs the grand theories and explores what it takes to work in the real world. He starts by discussing what doesn’t work–when managers dream up ambitious scenarios but leave the execution to their underlings, things are bound to go wrong. In other words: formula is easy; execution is hard. Ownership, according to Hrebiniak, is the key to success, and he moves clearly through the many steps of taking strategy from the theoretical to the concrete. There are sections devoted to all the common pitfalls: information sharing, providing appropriate incentives, and managing culture change. Case studies of big corporations and the challenges they met or flubbed provide a real-world look at the stakes involved. The author also provides an examination of power and influence as they relate to execution, and a section that demonstrates how his theories could be applied to recent M&As. In all, a mercifully cut-and-dry, clear-eyed view of one way in which businesses can succeed or fail.

Product Description
"Formulating strategy is one thing. Executing it throughout the entire organization well, that's the really hard part. Without effective execution, no business strategy can succeed. Unfortunately, most managers know far more about developing strategy than about executing it - and overcoming the difficult political and organizational obstacles that stand in their way. In this book, Larry Hrebiniak offers a comprehensive, disciplined process model for making strategy work in the real world.

Hrebiniak shows why execution is even more important than many senior executives realize, and sheds powerful new light on why businesses fail to deliver on even their most promising strategies. He offers a systematic roadmap for execution that encompasses every key success factor: organizational structure, coordination, information sharing, incentives, controls, change management, culture, and the role of power and influence in the execution process.

Making Strategy Work concludes with a start-to-finish case study showing how to use Hrebiniak's ideas to address one of today's most difficult business execution challenges: ensuring the success of a merger or acquisition. The advice on making M&A strategies work justifies the addition of this book to any execution toolkit.

• Building the capabilities and culture you'll need to execute
• How to align your organization's skills, resources, and culture around the strategies you're pursuing
• Integrating long-term strategy with short-term operations
• Why managing the short-term is crucial to the success of long-term strategy
• Ensuring robust coordination up, down, and sideways
• Effective information sharing and cooperation: bringing coherence and focus to execution
• Managing change, including culture change
• Avoiding "speed traps," resistance, and other change-related problems that hurt execution

" --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Reader Reviews
I have often felt that many times the leadership of a company or even division was all about defining the strategy, where are we going and what are the overall goals. It was then up to the next level of management to make it happen. I am a manager and like most managers I have had a few occasions when I new where we should be going, I felt I clearly set the direction, but something in the execution failed and we did noting but waste a lot of time to get half measures. The world is full of good plans that failed due to poor performance. This book explains that a true leader needs to keep the execution of the strategy in mind when creating the direction. Combine the two and get your hands dirty in the working of the plan. This book is all about getting the job done, covering the processes and actions that need to get done to make solid strategies work. The author created this book from real life experiences, either his own or those of case studies and interviews. He is giving the reader solid techniques derived from real world examples that were a success. I also got a great deal out of the final chapter. The author shows the reader how to apply what he has detailed in the book into a real life problem. Making a strategy come together and really work is either good management or luck and most of us are not that lucky. This book gives you the tools for making strategies work. What I liked about the book is even though the author is aiming for the CEO chair with the book, the methods he talks about could be used by any level of management on any size of project. The book is well written and enjoyable. It is well work your time.