Video

Strategy Planning Step 6: Execution

Often, strategy plans are intellectual exercises that consume precious time and are often ignored or outdated by the time they need to be used.

In this video, we explore the final step in successful Strategy Planning: accountable execution.

Be sure to watch the overview of all 6 steps here.

Presented by Kut Akdogan, Partner at Gaussian Holdings.

Strategy execution: summary of video

In the last few videos, we walked through the first five interlinked steps to strategizing:

  1. Defining outcomes
  2. Research
  3. Ideation
  4. Prioritization
  5. Approval

Each step is crucial but it's meaningless to build an approved strategy deck in PowerPoint and let it rot on your shared drive. Strategy must go hand in hand with execution. A  cohesive strategy must be broken down into lower level initiatives and outcomes that teams can execute against and be held accountable to.

For instance, a multi-year strategy may concretely define the outcomes of an annual strategy, and an annual strategy may define the outcomes required for the next quarter. Let's take our example. We have defined a multi-year outcome of $100 million annual run rate revenue. We have a 2-5 year strategic statement of scale our reach -  rapidly grow our marketplace with third party products and adopt a repeatable launch model to expand in China while improving efficiency in the U.S. This may break down into multiple low level outcomes we need to hit within the next year. For instance, onboard 1 third party product vendor, achieve, $1 million in revenue from China from existing product portfolio, reduce average design-to-launch time to three months.

Each of these outcomes could have one or more initiatives, such as hire a dedicated business development team. By having this connectivity from your strategic outcomes all the way to the initiatives that your teams are working on, you can massively improve transparency, confidence in the strategy, and performance against your multi-year objectives. 

That's the last in our video series on the 6 steps to strategy planning. For more details or information on how to set up a best practice strategy function at your organization, contact us here or shoot us a note by email or on LinkedIn.

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