“Make it so,” says Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise at the end of every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. If only execution was as easy in real life. The fact is that Do is the hardest part of SEE, FEEL, THINK, DO. It is estimated that CEOs consider implementation of strategy to be about six times harder than creating it. We think this is an underestimation.

According to Sahar Hashemi, co-founder of Coffee Republic, the high-street coffee chain: “The thing that separates entrepreneurs is really very simple. Whilst others dream, entrepreneurs see a good idea through to fruition. Whereas for most people an idea is cast aside after a couple of investigatory phone calls and perhaps a few discouraging comments from the so-called ‘experts’, entrepreneurs don’t quit, even when all they have to go on is gut instinct. They keep working hard to realise their dreams. The entrepreneurial mind thinks like this: “I don’t have any experience, or special skills, I don’t have the money. I have no idea how I’m going to do it. But I’m still going to do it.”

One organisation that has proved itself brilliant at execution is Tesco. It has moved from fourth place in the UK market to becoming market leader and achieving a £2 billion profit for the financial year ending April 2005. Tim Mason, Tesco’s director of corporate marketing, puts this down to 'doing.'  He says, “We’re quite good at strategic planning but what we’re actually really good at is doing things – doing things for customers. We don’t talk about it, we do it. Most businesses have plans. Some business plans are better than ours. Where most businesses fall down is that they don’t implement their plans.”

We agree. Many organisations fail to execute change successfully because they lack the discipline to really pay attention to the basic processes that create value in an organisation. You cannot achieve different results without different behaviors, and you do not get different behaviors without different processes and practices. This requires careful attention to every component of the business model.

We have seen many companies that have had grand plans for their brand or their customer experience. Many of these organisations fail however because executives put their faith in “change management.“ They thought that by bringing in consultants and organising motivational events, people would change their behavior and create different results. Well, sometimes they do. For a time. The problem is that the life of an event, no matter how good it is, can be measured in weeks rather than months. Without new leadership, skills, processes, structures, and reward mechanisms to back it up, the enthusiasm soon wanes, and people revert to old ways of working. So what are the key ingredients that enable an organisation to ‘do’ and deliver it’s strategy.

Following his research with over 50 companies in 20 countries, Shaun identified 12 building blocks that successful organisations pay attention to, which enable them to achieve tangible business results.

1. Market focus: the extent to which management are engaged with customers and have an accurate view of the marketplace.

2. Vision, mission, and strategy: the clarity of direction, and the extent to which this is aligned with target customer needs.

3. Culture: the values and principles that drive behavior, and the extent to which they support the strategy.

4. People policies: HR systems that reinforce or support the strategy.

5. Climate: the level of morale in the organisation and quality of internal communications to support the change.

6. Standards and procedures: the way that the work gets done and the processes necessary to support it are aligned.

7. Service: the way the product is delivered through the customer-focused behaviour of people.

8. Quality: the relative quality of the product or service compared with competitive products.

9. Differentiation: the extent to which the organisation is seen as different and valuable by customers.

10. Performance tracking: the extent to which the organisation measures its performance on the things that matter to customers rather than the things that are easy to measure.

11. Sustaining performance: the ability of the company to reinvent itself when required.

12. Leadership: leaders that are articulate and intentional about managing each of these 12 dimensions, so that they “walk the talk“ rather than “stumble the mumble“ when the time comes to execute their strategy.

These 12 dimensions form the focus of our Organisational Alignment Survey® which has been used by many organisations worldwide as a health check to evaluate their ability to implement their strategy. In effect, these 12 areas are the 'nuts and bolts' of the organisation, which have to be tightened, tuned, and tested to ensure that the company moves from 'Think' to 'Do.'

So how do we 'Do'? Again, we have broken this concept down into three guiding principles, which will help to turn vision into action:

• Nuts and bolts. What are the specific things we have to get right and put in place to make the perfect world a reality?

• Magic dust. Exciting people about your offering needs more than just good marketing or even good service: it needs a little bit of magic, because it requires the customer to engage with the brand in a way that endows the product with 'an indelible memory,' (to quote Tom Ford, former chief designer at Gucci).

• Measurement. How do we know we have succeeded? We feel that the pendulum has swung too far towards scientific management, IQ and hard data. But this does not mean that we do not subscribe to the importance of measurement. The fact is that without a clear goal and a way of measuring our progress towards it, we can just as easily swing too far the other way. The challenge is to find ways of managing the 'soft stuff' not just the 'hard stuff.' Most organisations base their measurement on what is easy to measure (usually quantitative), rather than what is important to customers (often qualitative).

Many of the companies we feature in our book are successful because they not only thought differently, but they dared to do differently. At the heart of their thinking and their continual quest to improve is a simple and powerful question. In fact, it is such an important element to SEE, FEEL, THINK, DO that we have devoted a whole chapter to it.  Unless as an organisation you are prepared to ask this simple question repeatedly, you will never be able to make the transformations in customer experience or the leaps in business that will bring the greatest success.

Find out more in our book SEE, FEEL, THINK, DO.

Top of page >>