Strategy That Works: How Winning Companies Close the Strategy-To-Execution Gap by Paul Leinwand & Cesare R. Mainardi SUMMARY
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Course
Strategy
Institution
Orientation Cycle
Book
Strategy That Works
Strategy That Works: How Winning Companies Close the Strategy-To-Execution Gap by Paul Leinwand & Cesare R. Mainardi, with Art Kleiner, Harvard Business Re view Press, 288 pages. This is a complete summary of every chapter with its key concepts. In Strategy That Works, the authors explain why the c...
STRATEGY that WORKS
“Your strategy is no longer just about where you go or where to grow.
Now, it’s primarily about who you are and what you’re great at.”
Overcoming the Strategy-to-Execution Gap
The path to creating value is not clear. There is a significant and unnecessary gap between where the
enterprise aims to go and what it can accomplish. → Success is clearly related to the distinctive way they
do things: their distinctive capabilities. Strategy is not about where to go or where to grow, but its primarily
who you are and what you are great at.
Capabilities are the link between strategy and execution. They are the place where a company truly
differentiates itself, where the work takes place, and manages itself around a few differentiating
capabilities—and deliberately integrates them. When companies accomplish this, we say they are
coherent.
“Coherence” refers to the alignment among three strategic elements:
• A value proposition that distinguishes a company from other companies (we sometimes call this a
“way to play” in the market)
• A system of distinctive capabilities that reinforce each other and enable the company to deliver on
this value proposition
• A chosen portfolio of products and services that all make use of those capabilities
➔ These elements shape the company’s identity, its practices, its culture, its approach to managing
resources, its role in the world at large—and its ability to close the gap between strategy and execution.
THE 5 ACTS OF UNCONVENTIONAL LEADERSHIP against the current conventional way of
leadership to tackle the gap between Strategy and Execution:
1. Instead of focusing on growth, commit to an identity: Differentiate and grow by being clear-minded
about what you can do best
2. Instead of pursuing functional excellence, translate the strategic into everyday life: Build and connect
the cross-functional capabilities that deliver your strategic intent
3. Instead of reorganizing to drive change, put your culture to work: Celebrate and leverage your cultural
strengths
4. Instead of going lean, cut costs to grow stronger: Prune what doesn’t matter to invest more in what does
5. Instead of becoming agile and resilient, shape your future: Reimagine your capabilities, create demand,
and realign your industry on your own terms
, Rather than chasing what you think is working elsewhere or trying to implement others’ best practices,
staying true to what is unique about your organization and your employees and strengthening those
capabilities turns out to be a strategy that works.
Conventional management practices have mostly developed through trial and error, without a fundamental
theory for value creation. Since they developed independently, often without any direct link to a company’s
strategy, following them can often lead to incoherence. The five acts of unconventional leadership take
different forms in different companies, but there is a family resemblance across all of them.
1. Commit to an Identity
Strategic intent: how do you create value? → Discover who you are as a company and stay true to your
value proposition and capabilities system over the long term.
Identity: expresses what your enterprise does exceptionally well and why it matters. When the company is
coherent, the people who work there can typically talk about its identity with certainty and clarity.
Requires a lot of introspection. As you think about your own company’s identity, keep thinking about what
you do and who you are. Don’t limit your identity to products or services. Products and services may
change. Your company may well evolve to transcend the current limits of your sector or category, enabling
you to move into new enterprises without losing the qualities that set you apart.
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