Implementation trumps theory.  Every time.

Your Brilliant Strategy may be completely useless.  Do you know why?

By Chronicles of Experience:

If you do not prioritise implementation, your business strategies will fail every time.  A mediocre strategy coupled with effective implementation can lead to great success, while an amazing strategy with lacklustre implementation will leave you feeling frustrated with yet another defeat.  Below I have listed a couple of things to consider when trying to implement your business strategies.

Prioritise your implementation:

Focus your energy on two or three main priorities and implement that one hundred percent.  Once you have overcome this first major challenge and the most vital parts of your strategy are running smoothly, the rest should snowball quickly.

Reactive and Proactive actions:

Some things are out of your control, others can be held firmly in hand and it is the latter your efforts should be focussed on.  Plan ahead and be aware of the possible difficulties that are on your way.  Hurdles are much easier to clear when you can see them coming your way.

It’s about what you put in:

My advice is to keep a scorecard of some sort.  You cannot measure the success or failure of your strategy purely by output.  Place a higher value on your input and focus your attention on who is putting in the energy and how effective they are at implementing your strategy.

Team commitment:

ACCOUNTABILITY!  I cannot stress this enough.  Your team has to be 110% on board with the plan and committed to the implementation.  Without your team’s support, nothing will come of your beautiful charts, plans and predictions.

Rome was not built in a day:

You cannot commit partially to a new plan and have any hope for it to succeed.  Change is always challenging and must not be taken likely.  Implementing a new strategy is not something you can quickly catch up on over the weekend.  You must stay determined and keep working at it.

Final thought:  The only way to create an effective strategy is to spend most of your time planning the implementation.