Seven Strategy Questions A Simple Approach for Better Execution
by Robert Simons
Harvard Business School E TEST.
To stay ahead of the pack, you must translate your organizations competitive strategy into day-to-day actions that will enable your company to win in the marketplace. This means channeling resources into the right efforts, striking a balance between innovation and control, and getting everyone pulling in the same direction.
How to accomplish all this? Continually ask the right questions, advises Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons. By posing these provocative questions, you identify critical gaps in your strategy execution processes, focus on the most important choices you must make, and understand what's at stake in each one.
In this concise guide, Simons presents the seven key questions you and your team must regularly explore together:
1. Who is your primary customer? Have you organized your company to deliver maximum value to that customer?
2. How do your core values prioritize shareholders, employees, and customers? Is everyone in your company committed to those values?
3. What critical performance variables are you tracking? How are you creating accountability for performance on those variables?
4. What strategic boundaries have you set? Does everyone know what actions are off-limits?
5. How are you generating creative tension? Is that tension catalyzing innovation across units?
6. How committed are your employees to helping each other? Are they sharing responsibility for your company's success?
7. What strategic uncertainties keep you awake at night? How are you riveting everyone's attention on those uncertainties?
These questions will force you to reexamine the unspoken assumptions underlying your strategy and analyze how it's implemented through your business processes and structures. Simons's extensive examples will help you understand your options and make the tough choices needed for your company to excel at execution.
Drawing on decades of research into performance Management systems and organization design, Seven Strategy Questions is a no-nonsense, must-read resource for all leaders in your organization.
ROBERT SIMONS is the Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Over the last twenty-five years, Simons has taught accounting, management control, and strategy implementation courses in both the Harvard MBA and Executive Education Programs. He has served as chairman of Harvard's Advanced Management Program and co-chair of the Driving Corporate Performance program, and has developed two MBA courses: Achieving Profit Goals and Strategies, and Designing Organizations for Performance.
Simons is the author of three earlier books: Levers of Control, Levers of Organization Design, and Performance Measurement and Control Systems for Implementing Strategy. His ongoing research into the relationship between business strategy, organization design, and management control systems has been published in management journals such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and Strategic Management Journal.
A Canadian chartered accountant, Simons earned his PhD from McGill University. He has testified as an expert witness in U.S. Federal Court and served as a consultant to companies around the world.
Introduction
1. Who is your primary customer?
2. How do your core values prioritize shareholders, employees, and customers?
3. What critical performance variables are you tracking?
4. What strategic boundaries have you set?
5. How are you generating creative tension?
6. How committed are your employees to helping each other?
7. What strategic uncertainties keep you awake at night?