DOING THE RIGHT THING RIGHT

“Doing the right thing right” is one of my favorite maxims by Peter Drucker.

Doing the right thing – i.e. setting the right strategy for the different businesses over time-horizons – is a capital task, but it can be badly corrupted by an inadequate implementation. Doing the right thing also depends on the organization’s ability to do the thing right. Thus, the strategy must be in line with the mindset of the people, and with the methods and means of the organization or it will not work. Kaplan & Norton posited: “Nine out of then organizations fail to execute their strategies”.

Deficiencies in doing the right thing right can be imputed to business-leaders ?who focus on parts of the process of strategic management rather than on the process as a whole. Hereafter an excerpt from the “The Five Forces of Enterprise”, which lays out the 5 steps of the process of strategic management captured under the acronym the SP.I.D.E.R., namely: strategy + plans, investments, deployment, execution, and reviews. (1)

J. J. Dordain submitted: ”The shortest way to understand the future goes through a deep understanding of the past”. So, setting the strategy starts with “the study of the past”, which analyses the ?strengths and weaknesses of the? interactions of the five forces of enterprise, namely: the people, the powers, the process of strategic management, the partners, and the products.

?It is followed by “the study of the future”, which will lead to the development of the strategy, i.e. the right thing to do in the different businesses, how best to do it, with whom to do it, and with what current and with what new resources to be developed.

The strategy leads to laying out the plans that will enable the organization to meet the ambitious targets that have been set with the assigned means. The next step, the investments-step, reviews the strategy, the plans, and the investments to raise the capabilities needed at time-horizons. Being iterative, the investments-step can call into question the strategy that looks too modest or too ambitious, and the plans that fail to spur the connectivity, the creativity, and the cooperation.

Gen. D. D. Eisenhower said: “The plan is nothing, planning is everything”. Allow me to replace “planning” with the deployment of the plans. So, after strategy and plans, and after the investments-step, the next step features the sub-process of the strategic and organizational deployment of the plans. “The Five Forces of Enterprise” lays out 5 value-chains, one for each of the organizational functions. So, the deployment of the plans gets the teams to work out their cooperation-schemes first within their value-chain, and then with teams of the other value-chains.

Being iterative, the process of strategic and organizational deployment may call into question some of the investments. Working out “the who does what, how, with whom” across the value-chains really reinforces the commitment, the cooperation, and the collectively creativity of the teams. Thusly, this sub- process combines the vertical and the horizontal deployment of the plans.

Albert Einstein posited: “Vision without execution is hallucination”. The sub-process of strategic and organizational deployment ensures that the vision gets implemented. However, should unforeseen situations seriously affect the execution step, the teams that have worked together on the deployment will be well equipped to make the changes as directed by their leadership.?

?The process of strategic management starts with reflections and it ends with the reviews of the final results. The reviews also looks into the performances of each of the steps of this process, and into the performances of the interactions of the five forces of enterprise.

(1) W. A. Sussland "The Five Forces of the Enterprise" Kindle 2023