Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change: Lawrence G. Hrebiniak
Editorial Reviews
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 excellent 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.
“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.
