The Foundations of Successful Strategy Implementation

While organizations understand the need for strategy and its effective implementation, in most of the organizations implementation often falls short of the goals that the enterprise has set itself. This is because their implementation process often falls victim to a number of formidable obstacles. Keeping this in view, this article attempts to identify obstacles to strategy implementation and focuses on spelling out the factors which help in promoting successful strategy implementation. Based on the data collected from 104 managers of a cross-section of organizations, the study identified 11 obstacles most frequently experienced by companies during implementation of their strategies. In order to remove these obstacles and promote successful strategy implementation, organizations should focus on developing sound strategy, allocate sufficient resources to it, ensure management commitment and leadership, manage employee understanding and commitment, connect financial rewards with performance and establish effective information systems. Companies which are able to address these areas will prevent various implementation problems from occurring and promote success.