No Strategy Without Implementation

This post is the sixth in a series of ten that are currently being featured on LinkedIn in honor of the Crossland Group’s 25th Anniversary.

“Vision without execution is hallucination.” With origins dating back to an ancient Japanese proverb, this quotation by Thomas Edison has particular meaning for our organization. About fifteen years ago, while helping clients reimagine their strategy, we noticed that very few organizations had the confidence that their strategies would be fully implemented. Instead, people talked about the “document on the shelf” that teams rarely accessed or adapted. While many could recite ambitious goals, there was less attention paid to how these goals would actually be achieved. We asked ourselves, “What’s the point of doing the strategy work and then letting it sit on a shelf?”

In 2010, we significantly shifted our business to focus more of our work on strategy implementation. It meant that we had to really understand how people translated strategy and what elements were critical to making it happen. This shift gave birth to our groundbreaking work around intentionally designing and aligning organizations to fulfill their strategy. 

Once Crossland began expanding its implementation work, we also decided that we would no longer take on work to develop strategy unless there was a commitment to invest in implementation. While we have lost some work over the years as a result of this decision, clients of ours who have chosen to invest in implementation have said that our work in connecting the dots between vision and action gave them the tools to bridge ideas and results and to better adapt their strategy going forward.

#Crossland25