We need to re-focus on the importance of doing
Drawing up a strategy is exciting. The entire process of brainstorming, interpreting consumer insights, analysing research, playing with postulates and creating hypotheses is exhilarating. Eating those dry sandwiches late at night, gulping zillion cups of black coffee, knocking off objections and punching in PowerPoint presentations — that’s an ideal day at office. And indeed what many of us dreamt of while soaking in Peter Drucker at B-school
Trouble is, there are too many strategists floating around corporate corridors but not many doers. Now, what’s wrong with that? Isn’t it the ability to think strategies that enables one to be picked up in any managerial assignment in the first place? There are not many who’d like to dirty their hands with execution. And in any case, ‘execution’ is not the in-thing because it is considered uncreative, mundane and, therefore, boring, whereas drawing up strategies gets the adrenaline flowing. Some leaders simply delegate execution to their down-line though they stay deeply involved through every stage of strategy development, thereby reinforcing the misgivings that most managers have about execution.
The lowly status of ‘execution’ is so deeply embedded in our mindset that often when a strategy fails to deliver the desired results we look for chinks in the strategic construct rather than look at the loopholes in the execution process. Not too many companies give execution the kind of importance it deserves. A tool that most organisations use nowadays to help develop managerial talent is the Assessment Centre, where they have their folks assessed on wide-ranging competencies such as analytical ability, planning, drive for results, customer focus, impact and influence, and innovation. Everything, it would seem, except execution. One of my clients, for whom I am on the panel of assessors, is an exception in the sense that he maps execution as one of the competencies. Not surprisingly, the panel finds flair for execution to be a development need for most managers and lands up downloading a development plan on building up this competency.
Are we, as a race, obsessed with strategising? My answer to this is not ‘Perhaps, Maybe’, but an assertive ‘Yes’. I call it the Chanakya-syndrome! We all want to be the Chanakyas of our enterprises and want to be left free to think strategy. We feel that’s our calling. Tell a manager to come for a strategy meet and you see him or her drooling. Call them to discuss an execution roadmap or review an execution blueprint and they suddenly have a hundred pre-committed engagements. Recently the CEO of one of my consulting clients invited me to work with his entire leadership team and get them to re-focus on execution. Even though we were talking to senior people, we had to prod, cajole and eventually push them to work around the concept of execution. On probing, I discovered that the basic resistance came from the belief that if leaders get involved with execution then they are disempowering people in their teams. ‘Are you not asking us to micro-manage things?’ was the question that most asked. And no, they didn’t want an answer as they firmly believed that engaging with execution is akin to micro-managing affairs.
How often do strategies fail for things that were supposed to happen but did not happen? Execution is all about harmonising people, strategy and operations. As Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy put it in their best-selling book Execution — “It is a systematic process of discussing the mechanisms, of questioning, tenaciously following through and ensuring accountability.”
Execution may not be glamorous or sensational but it is essential to the success of any strategy. Focus on execution does not amount to micro-managing. It is all about simplifying steps in order to get things done. It is about reducing things to bare bones. It is about getting everyone in the team on the same page. It is about common sense that one sees in theatre rehearsals where everyone knows his part and works to get in sync with others so that there are no goof-ups in the actual performance. In other words, execution is about making reliable management of complexity a routine. It is about adherence to protocol. The issue is that people have problems with the idea of adherence to protocol and often mistake it as rigidity and thus relegate execution to something that’s unexciting. Not for long though as slowly but surely Corporate India is getting hooked to execution. Move on Chanakyas — make space for the doer!
Giraj Sharma is a New Delhi-based management consultant
