HYPERSPEED MOGULS: Closing the Execution Gap

Every time a skier takes to the slope, they alter the landscape just a little, pushing out the snow and reshaping it with every turn. Eventually, the impact of hundreds of skiers takes shape: small bumps called ‘moguls’ appear on the slope. If you aren’t paying attention, one of these moguls could send you careening off-balance into the snow.
 
Skiing moguls shares a lot in common with executing a business strategy. There are obstacles dotting the path to realizing key business outcomes — if you aren’t prepared to pivot quickly, your business plans could be upended.

 

Mind the Gap

An ‘execution gap’ is when companies fail to effectively implement or iterate on a business strategy, which prevents them from achieving hyperspeed value and may allow their competitors to surpass them.
 
Worried about unforeseen execution gaps? Read on to discover the five reasons why companies fall short in executing their strategies and learn how you can maneuver past these hyperspeed moguls.

 

Prioritization

Business strategies that take months to plan can take years to execute. They’re full of moving parts to manage and goals to realize.
 
The first execution gap, and one of the top mistakes businesses make, is failing to prioritize their goals. Leaders often feel pressured to show early results to stakeholders after presenting a finalized business strategy, and many of them mistakenly believe that aggressively pursuing all goals at once is the right approach. Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect: It leads to a glacial strategy rollout with little to no progress made against any goals.

 

Maneuvering past the mogul

To avoid this error, it helps to understand that the quickest way to progress is one incremental step at a time, which requires a tight focus on one priority outcome. Here are some tips to achieve that mindset and make it work to your advantage:

    

Speed

The nature of business lends itself to slow decision making. With many stakeholders — the C-suite, investors, board members, managers, employees and more — getting the necessary approvals for any major business move can be an extensive and time-consuming process.
 
Herein lies the second execution gap: companies fail to move fast enough to capture opportunities. You’re facing a new business environment, one enabled by cutting-edge technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Rapid change is the norm, not the outlier, which means that just keeping pace is no longer enough. You can’t rely on historical metrics for speed and ROI — the bar has risen. If you want to achieve hyperspeed value, it’s critical to be faster than your industry peers.

 

Maneuvering past the mogul

Achieving speed will require both cultural and operational changes in your organization. Here are some steps you can take to make both of these organizational shifts:

    

Agility

After spending months creating a business strategy, it’s understandable that you’d want to stick to it. However, no strategy is perfect, and the business environment is always in flux. By the time your strategy is in its execution phase, you may be facing a very different set of conditions than when you began.
 
Companies often fall into the trap of sticking too closely to their strategy and failing to adapt to shifting market conditions and customer needs, which describes the third execution gap. They don’t realize that strategic planning is a continuous process, and refusal to update the strategy leads them to act on old information that’s misaligned to the market. As a result, they end up missing out on emerging opportunities and won’t spot critical shifts in customer needs and behaviors.

 

Maneuver past the mogul

Staying agile means treating your strategy like a living document, not a finalized roadmap, and constantly revisiting your assumptions about your strategy and the business environment. Here are some ways you can ensure your strategy is calibrated to meet your evolving needs and those of your customers:

    

Capabilities

Successful execution of a strategy requires the right people with the right skills in the right positions.
 
The fourth execution gap occurs when a company fails to put leaders with the necessary expertise in place to execute a new strategy. Companies need dedicated drivers who can both garner support throughout the organization and have the authority make key decisions for each aspect of the strategy. All the agility, speed and prioritization in the world won’t make up for a gap in leadership.

 

Maneuver past the mogul

Avoiding this particular execution gap relies on making the most of your existing talent and hiring to compensate for any missing capabilities. Here are some tips to keep in mind as you reevaluate your talent base:

    

Communication

One of the most important pieces of strategy is the “why.” Your strategy is driving at a greater purpose. Does every individual in your organization understand that purpose and how it relates to the path you’ve charted?
 
This is the fifth execution gap, where businesses fail to clearly communicate their vision throughout the organization with cascading messages. If your team members don’t understand the point of the strategy, or how the strategy will help your company accomplish its stated goals, they’ll likely struggle to implement it effectively.

 

Maneuvering past the mogul

Communication is key to ensuring organization-wide buy-in. To make sure your communication effectively drives your strategy forward, follow these key tips:

     

---