These days, successful companies seem to have a system for everything. From acquiring new customers to managing customer relationships, from quality management to performance measurement, industry leaders have realized that having systematic processes in place reduces risk, prevents oversights, and assures the best chance of delivering results. Yet, despite this insight, most companies still haven't developed a system to manage their most important process: how to develop and execute their strategies.

In The Execution Premium, Robert Kaplan and David Norton show that companies using a formal system for implementing strategy consistently outperform their peers. So why do so many companies still fail to operationalize their strategy? The authors argue that while many of the tools needed for effective strategy deployment already exist, no framework has been developed that links the various strategy -. implementation elements together.

With books like The Ba/anced Scorecard

and The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed us how an emphasis on strategy can unite an organization and

drive increased levels of performance. Now they bring together all their work to create a comprehensive new management system

that companies can use to sustain world-class strategy execution. Their six-step process will teach you how to:

* Develop your strategy by clarifying your goals and conducting strategic analysis

* Plan your strategy by selecting theme-based measures, targets, and initiatives, along with accountability for performance

* Align organizational units and employees to your strategy

* Plan operations through priority setting and resource allocation

* Monitor and learn from operations and

strategy

* Test and adapt your strategy



To oversee all these processes, the authors introduce the Office of Strategy Management. The OSM serves as a kind of orchestra leader-coordinating activities across functions and business units and keeping everyone synchronized over time. The result is an organization that gains a real execution premium by being able to quickly and reliably execute its strategy.



About the authors:



ROBERT S. KAPLAN is the Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School.

DAVID P. NORTON is the founder of Balanced Scorecard Collaborative and a director of Palladium Group.



CONTENTS:



Preface

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

2. Develop the strategy

3. Plan the strategy

4. Strategic initatives : Launching the strategy into motion

5. Aligning organizational units and employees

6. Plan operations : Align process improvement programs

7. Plan operations : sales forecasts, resource capacity, and dynamic budgets

8. Operational and strategy review meetings

9. Meetings to test and adapt the strategy

10. The office of strategy management

Index