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1. Implement business strategy

Key ideas

Strategy describes what an organisation is attempting to accomplish over a period of years, as represented by the organisation's collective objectives.
A strategy specifies what you do and don't do and results in initiatives designed to achieve the defined organisational objectives.

Overview

Organisations exist to coordinate the work of many people towards a common business purpose (producing the organisation's products and/or services). To deliver its purpose, each organisation has a strategy, decided by the owner or the Board (as representatives of the owners), with business objectives, decided by the CEO. The work is then organised by managers and delegated to the right people, at the right level and in the right roles.

The process to develop and implement an organisation's strategy has two stages:

Strategic planning, which results in a clear set of strategic objectives defining what the organisation needs to do to be successful
Strategy implementation, where strategic objectives are converted into initiatives, with business plans to deliver the strategic initiatives.

As the Leadership Framework is about people and systems of work to support the management of people to achieve business objectives this section focuses on strategy implementation, not the development of strategy itself. The starting point for strategy implementation is after all strategic options have been assessed and the strategic objectives have been decided.

Member downloads

Access member downloads for Implement business strategy including:

Overview of the strategy implementation process
Defining the strategy
Aligning the organisation for strategy deployment
Cascading and deploying the strategy
Monitoring and assuring the strategy
Accountability for strategy development and implementation
Tools and resources - Why strategy implementation often fails
Tools and resources - Examples and tools are embedded into the content of member downloads