Why Is Strategy Execution So Hard?!

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Strategy  

A CEO recently described strategy execution to be as a game of Whack-A-Mole. For those unfamiliar, it is a carnival style game where plastic "moles" keep popping out of their holes and you have to "whack" them with a rubber hammer before they go down again. No matter how good the player, the game continues until eventually the moles win because the player can’t hit them all fast enough.

The comparison the CEO made is easy to understand. He solved one problem and another popped up, and it didn’t matter how many problems he "whacked"—he could never get to the point where everything was going smoothly.

I’m sure many (perhaps most) CEOs can relate to that situation. While strategy execution has become an increasingly important element of modern organizations, there is still a huge amount of variance in the quality of that execution. That is becoming a significant problem in an era where strategies have to evolve and change on a regular basis—if there’s no consistency, how can adjustments be made with any confidence?

It’s too simplistic to suggest that I can offer solutions to all the strategic execution issues organizations face in a single short article, and I’m not so arrogant as to think I have answers to problems that organizations the world over are struggling with, but there is one aspect …

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