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When Strategy and Culture Pull Employees in Different Directions, Execution Suffers
Learn moreStrategies blaze a new path forward, but ingrained culture can drag employees into old habits and derail execution. To close the gap between strategy and execution, cultural norms and leadership behaviors must support the new direction.
Our co-founders wrote the most popular strategy article ever published in the MIT Sloan Management Review and have worked with dozens of top teams on formulating value-creating strategies.
They also co-direct the Strategic Agility project that presents evidence-based recommendations on balancing strategic discipline with flexibility in execution.
Don is a strategy professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he is the course head of the core Competitive Strategy course, the most popular core elective in the MBA program.
Don and Charlie wrote the Harvard Business Review cover article on overcoming the key obstacles to strategy execution.
They worked with dozens of CEOs from the Young Presidents' Organization to crystalize their strategies, and identify key obstacles to execution, implement interventions to measurably improve execution.
Don developed and directed an award-winning executive education course on strategy execution for senior executives at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Our co-founders were recently invited by The Economist newspaper to discuss how AI will transform how companies measure and manage culture.
They co-authored the most popular series in the history of MIT Sloan Management Review, Measuring Culture. They co-direct the Measuring Culture research project at MIT Sloan.
They created Voice, an award-winning AI cultural management platform incorporating rigorous thought leadership.
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• Formulating a strategy results in a thick deck
• Executing strategy requires focus and simplicity
• Distill strategy into handful of must-win battles, prioritize them, and produce a strategy for execution
• Triangulate insight across multiple sources of employee feedback
• Assess what matters the most for execution as well as how it is performing
• Pinpoint most important culture and leadership behaviors to embody to achieve objectives
• Identify highest-impact interventions that actualize culture and leadership behaviors
• Recommendations grounded in decades of experience and thought leadership
• Ensure success by rigorously measuring progress and course correcting
Focus on the handful of cultural norms and leadership behaviors that will have the biggest impact on executing your strategy
Recommendations tailored to the specifics of your culture and strategy
Mine deep insights on obstacles and enablers to execution from the employees responsible for executing the strategy
See how the culture varies across salient segments of your organization, identifying pockets of excellence and challenge
You might be an especially good fit if:
We have developed a new strategy and/or we face challenges with strategy execution
We believe leadership behaviors and culture are critical to execution
We place a premium on rigorous measurement and data-based decisions
We want to integrate AI into our key people and culture decisions in a responsible way
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“Invest in a High-Yield Strategic Plan”, A.S. Judson, Journal of Business Strategy;
“Why CEOs Fail”, R. Charan & G. Colvin, Fortune;
“The High Cost of Low Performance”, Project Management Institute, Newtown Square: Project Management Institute;
“Joint Ventures and Competitive Strategy”, K.R. Harrigan, Strategic Management Journal;
“The Effects of Mergers and Post-Merger Integration: A Review of Business Consulting Literature”, P.A. Pautler, Draft Paper, Federal Trade Commission, Bureau of Economics.
