Bolt-On Strategy : A Misfit Or Blinding?

What made Team India win against the mighty Australians and Proteas during recent test season? Was it a great game plan or great team efforts or vibes of monkey distractions or turning pitches?

How will next parliamentary election be won? By launching superior campaigns or by agitating against increasing inflation or government's china policy? Take any field; sports, politics or business, the question is enticing. Which is more important - a great strategy or great execution?

Traditional consulting firms have commanded influence for long by perfecting the practice of strategy development and helping their clients with strategic solutions to improve their business performance. However, more recently lure of strategy has waned. Now it is quite clear among many top executives that when innovation is at the heart of any strategy, execution becomes so more important as innovation always involves treading into uncertain waters.

When capital is available in market easily to risk on new business, mindset becomes vulnerable. There are too many uncertain factors that nobody can resolve. No matter who developed the strategy, it must be assumed redundant. As uncertainty increases, the value of a well-thought-out strategy drops. In fact, when one pursues an entirely new business model, no amount of research can resolve the critical unknowns. All that strategy can do is to give you a plausible starting point. From there, one must experiment, learn, and adapt.

Many leaders mistakenly remain attached to their same initial strategy. For example, a risk consulting firm targeting US and Europeans market; has based its resource commitment and value proposition on basis of talent cost arbitrage advantage that it had envisaged initially. The services constituted a new market - one projected to grow rapidly with boom in outsourcing and advisory services from India that will save a huge sum for US & European clients. However, the market did not materialize as expected due to changed competition, economic and political scenario.

After some self introspection, the firm realized as to what had gone wrong. Naturally, the firm simply blamed the poor timing & execution, incorrect branding and poaching of its' core teammates by another risk consulting firm. After all, their strategy was brilliant. Right answer, wrong reason. Yes, the problem was poor timing & execution, but the sign of poor execution does not amount to (self-judged) brilliance of the initial strategy. The sign of poor execution was that the partners never questioned the strategy in first place and thus never revised it.

Execution. For a proven business, it is about performing at or above known standards. Many large, established organizations are able to sustain success because they are ruthless about holding their partners and directors accountable to meet or exceed standards and Innovate.

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