Implementing Your Strategic Plan

"A strategic plan is not a one-shot effort to "change direction and get us going.""

"Although critical to success, accountability systems are hard and often dull work."

"You can expect a project team with the right mix of disciplines and creative, motivated people to generate good ideas and good plans. If you settle for anything less, you risk mediocrity. "

"Organizations using departmental planning get results superior to those that don't."

"The organization's performance management system provides the framework for establishing and tracking individual accountabilities."

"When structure gets in the way of strategy, you need to change that structure?fast. "

"Although you may be tempted to try, you can't immediately throw out all those who don't perform to new standards and import perfect replacements."

"When you're picking a top-level leader to supercharge strategic change, there are competencies?personal traits and characteristics?you should look for. "

"Leaders who attempt to change and work with resisters drain their own and their company's energy and misguided attempts to convert the unconvertible or to avoid being the bad guy or gal."

"If team members still follow the traditional command-and-control model, they are not really a team at all."

"The single biggest cultural change tool is your people."

"Your strategic resources are your dowry to trade for sustained growth and future financial success."

"It is useful to check a random sample of lower-level individual objectives, tracing them up through their bosses' objectives to departmental objectives to ensure that they are aligned with the departmental plan and top corporate priorities."

"What makes risk worth taking is that, properly executed, a program to empower individuals, departments, and teams has several general benefits."

"Change won't be effective without new skills in the organization."

"By reengineering or fine-tuning your core processes, you should be able to improve market position and profitability significantly."

"Information must flow between top management and those executing critical programs and objectives such as priority issue action-planning teams and leverage managers."

"The overriding purpose of accountability meetings is to keep the strategic change plan moving forward, which is achieved by probing for facts, motivating implementers, and making "move-forward" decisions."

"Align your strategic compensation plan with the strategic plan."