Picture Mike, before and after three months of intense “strategic initiative work”. Same weight. Same shape. Same treadmill.
All initiatives green. All meetings held. Every project “delivered” on time. The needle didn’t move.
The quiet epidemic
This is the quiet epidemic of Strategy Execution: management by initiatives, not by objectives. Boards and ExCos proudly wave the green dashboards, while the strategic objectives sit red on the same page, waiting for someone to notice that this might be exactly why the results aren’t there either.
The test that matters
Name the one strategic objective in the Strategic Levers (or enablers) perspective of your Strategy Map that this initiative should move. Sniper view, not a machine-gun spray across the entire map.
- If you can’t, the initiative isn’t strategic. It’s just busy.
- If you can, but the needle still doesn’t move, something is off. Go and find out.
That is actually good news, because in Strategy Execution the only thing worse than bad news is bad news late.
A thank-you note
So write a small thank-you note to every initiative that kept you busy-looking for another quarter without moving the needle: “Thank you for the reports. Thank you for the meetings. Thank you for the illusion of progress. We would honestly have been better off without you.”
Pruning is more strategic than planting.
Productive destruction is a discipline. Kill an initiative today, not because it failed, but because it never mattered. Mike lost three months. And you?
Strategy definition without execution is hallucination. Executing initiatives without moving the strategic objectives’ needles is just… busy.