The Importance of Being Serious About Strategy

The fifth theme of this book is about “Making Strategy Real”. Good or bad strategy coupled with good or bad implementation bring together, the end to end understanding of the strategy process. This chapter discusses the implementation aspects of strategy. Recent studies in Asia illustrate that businesses largely fail to implement, or action, their strategic plans. This failure to implement severely undermines the utility and purpose of strategy. Strategies can be viewed as ways to address a difficulty, approaches to overcome an obstacle and responses to a challenge. Therefore, if the challenge is not clearly defined, it is difficult to assess the quality of the strategy and as such, impossible to conclude whether a strategy is good or bad. Good implementation is contrasted with bad implementation within the context of rapidly changing operational environments. The PEAR and SIEE frameworks for strategy implementation are presented and explained. Concurrently, the importance of a professional development agenda for organisations wishing to improve on their strategy and implementation is suggested. Components and criterion for evaluation of implementation are described. These are accompanied by methodological tools and result in the SIEE maturity matrix.