Strategy formulation — the exciting part of the job, though important, is only 10 per cent of the job done. At the end of the day, top executives get paid for delivering results and 90 per cent of the credit is earned there.
MBAs dream of becoming CEOs asap. If possible the very day they graduate with an MBA degree. They go out into the corporate world with stars in their eyes looking at the salaries they are offered.
Within a few months they realise that real life is very different from what they thought it would be. You are not called for to recommend strategies. You are not even told what the strategy is. You make PPTs and presentations for your boss and make minutes of meeting and follow-up on his/her behalf. You learn.
Getting things done
The first 10/15 years of the managerial career is about execution. You are going to be judged based on that. Your career propulsion depends on how well you get things done. While strategising is a left-brain job by and large (and hence excites MBAs who are typically high on IQ), execution, the grunt work requires right brain abilities and EQ. Unlike the neat, elegant world of strategising, the execution world is complex, uncertain and ambiguous. But that’s where the big bucks are.
Unlike strategy formulation, which can be done in isolation by the top management or strategy team, perched in their top floors, ‘the Ivory Towers’ and can be a once a year affair, strategy execution is an organisational-wide phenomenon, every member of the organisation is involved irrespective of the hierarchy and is acted upon every day. This is what makes execution complex and uncertain.
Two sides of the enterprise
Any enterprise has two sides, the business side and the organisational side. Great leaders of great companies focus mostly on the organisational side and much less on the business side of the enterprise. They intuitively know that excelling in execution depends on how good are you as an organsiation, the process, the people, and the culture and value systems.
Even a hard-nosed CEO such as Jack Welch (in my view, the best CEO the world has ever seen) is supposed to have spent almost two-third of his time on organisational issues and only one third on the business issues. Imagine doing that in a company like GE, operating in 100 different businesses and in 100 different countries. You manage people who manage the business.
Like the iconic businessman Harold Geneen said: “Leadership is about getting people who are better than you and make them work for you”.
Execution is about setting a compelling vision/mission, organising the resources and people for achieving the same, evolving a strategy for the same, creating a enabling organisational culture and values, set goals and galvanise/motivate the organisation towards that goal, create a conducive monitoring/reviewing and rewarding mechanism.