Photo: Charles Plant, founder of Material Minds, presents at the Titan Learning Event: Connecting Strategy with Action.
When was the last time you peeked at your annual strategic plan? Do you know whether you’re aligning your progress with your goals? Are you using metrics to analyze individual and organizational success?
For Charles Plant, entrepreneur and former MaRS Discovery District Managing Director, executing strategy was a struggle. He realized that he prepared an annual strategic plan, put it in a drawer, and never looked at it again.
In the three years since he founded Material Minds in 2011, Plant has spent a lot of time focusing on strategy execution, so much so that he now knows he can do it successfully. His firm is dedicated to helping companies do the same.
“I have to apologize in advance,” Plant said Thursday as he kicked off his talk at Communitech’s Titan Learning Event: Connecting Strategy with Action. “This is a boring subject that people don’t get excited about. It’s not sexy. But success is sexy.”
He explained that there’s a disconnect between leadership and roles in organizations, and a struggle between the traditional industrial economy and the knowledge economy.
“What’s the root word in the term ‘executive’? Execute. Successful companies are phenomenal at good execution,” he said.
He explained that leaders in the industrial economy manage process. Their responsibility is to make sure that everything is functioning properly and to know exactly what they achieved at the end of the day.
On the other hand, leaders in the knowledge economy flip from managing process to managing results with a lack of detailed information on how well they’re doing, which is a challenge for millennials in particular.
“Millennials need constant communication about how they’re doing. Nowadays, the knowledge economy doesn’t tell anyone,” said Plant.
So who’s responsible for strategy execution? “Most of the time, I get the answer ‘we all are,’” he said.
Plant explained that the key to connecting strategy with action is to plan where you want to go and the steps needed to get there, apply measurable benchmarks to those plans, align what everyone in the organization needs to do, use individual and company-wide metrics, motivate others beyond dollars by building a future that’s measurable, and create a culture that examines everything the team needs to do to get better results.
What seems like a daunting task can be eased by the fact that employees generally want to do better.
“People innately want to improve,” Plant said. “Results are more powerful than process. It’s what connects strategy with action. Employees wake up knowing exactly what they need to do to be successful.”
Unsexy as it might be, then, connecting strategy with action is “the biggest and most important project a company will ever have.”
