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Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the celebrated authors of the "balanced scorecard" have come out with a new book: "The Execution Premium:
Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage" and Robert Kaplan's interview appears here. Kaplan and Norton give excellent ideas about the mechanics of aligning strategy to operations. One particularly interesting idea is to add an "office of strategy management" which to me is a difficult one when companies are trying to reduce people. In any case, I am a big supporter of an old idea that Peters and Waterman came out with in excellent companies in the eighties. That was a "bias for action". At the end of the day high flaunting strategy is not very useful if things don't get done. Well how do you executive strategy ? You break down directions to simple clear directives like the famous "being the low cost airline" for Southwest where decisions like replacing peanuts with a more expensive ceasar salad can be vetoed simply on the grounds that they violate core strategy. Naturally, the guru of this genre of thinking is Ram Charan and here is a quick summary of related ideas. In any event, the the quest for execution continues…