Strategy Execution and Complexity

Book excerpt: Almost all organisations today face unprecedented levels of change, complexity and volatility. Navigating the resultant disruption dynamics is one of the most important stewardship challenges facing strategic leaders. Getting it right can pay enormous dividends, but getting it wrong can lead to spectacular failure and the ultimate demise of once admired organisations. To address this threat, strategic leaders need to better understand how to navigate complexity and volatility and how to execute strategy in this rapidly changing environment. This book identifies 12 different strategy execution processes used to realise deliberate and emergent strategies – each illustrated with case studies and essential lessons for strategic leaders. The authors then discuss the effectiveness of these processes in different types of complex environments, showing how, used in isolation, each process can, at times, impede performance, sometimes creating survival risks that materialise today or in the future. The authors show the importance of "ambidexterity" and the need for organisations to balance the pursuit of internal efficiency and external market flexibility, both of which are essential to thriving in complex environments. This book provides essential tools for leaders to rethink and reconfigure their strategy execution practices in light of the significant change surrounding their organisations. The book is based on a 5-year, multistage study comprehensively reviewing cutting-edge research on strategy execution, reviewing seminal texts on strategy execution and, through in-depth case study interviews and cross-sectional surveys, identifying contemporary strategy execution practices of a range of different organisations across industries and sectors.