The Difficulty of Maintaining Direct Focus on Strategy

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Strategy  

In order to establish a strategy for an enterprise, the directive must come from the top—it has to.

For one thing, strategic initiatives need to accommodate the encompassing perspective of an organization’s overall business operations. To have that viewpoint requires a capacity for “big picture” oversight and administrative responsibility that only executive stakeholders possess.

Secondly, to execute a far-reaching strategy requires the direction from senior management personnel to make sure it gets carried out and is not circumvented by departmental or political factions.

You might think that the united and decisive commands from a company’s decision makers would be sufficient to carry out their proposals, but without the proper focus, many corporate strategies fail—instead turning into disjointed, vague and unmotivated attempts at unifying teams and bringing about change.

Much of the failure may be because the executive branch does not understand or have full knowledge of its own fundamental corporate strategic initiatives. If you sit down with a group of senior managers from any given organization and ask them to tell you what their company’s top three initiatives are, more often than not they will not be able to succinctly and accurately list only three—and will no doubt only provide you with initiatives that …

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