Recently I was working with my team member, Robin Blackburn; you might recall she is the editor of my book, What Businesses Need To Know Right Now, and we were brainstorming for a new campaign that will be going live soon.
The concept that kept bubbling up to the top was ‘Strategy.’ We were thinking about how important working with a strategy is to actualize the vision that you create. How it is necessary for effective decision making. How it can help you see your strengths and weaknesses. How it can help you track your goals.
But the strategy is not enough.
So many of us have a vision and a strategy, but on a day-to-day basis, we fall short in one area…implementation.
As I presented multiple Strategic Planning sessions in January, what came up again and again was, “How do I ensure that I will get the results that I am strategizing about? How can I ensure I will DO the plan?”
Have you found yourself asking these very same questions?
After hearing, “How can I ensure I will do the plan?” so often in January, it inspired me to pull all of these pieces together – strategy, implementation, and results – and really take a good, hard look at it.
One thing you probably know about me is that I believe there is power in taking consistent incremental action towards a goal (the right goal). These consistent, incremental steps lead to results. I say this often to clients. I say it in presentations. I say it to myself. Yes, there’s even a note on my office wall about it.
Did you not know that my office walls are covered in notes to myself? They are. I place them up on the walls so that I can look up and see them as I work. The most prominent note currently is my Battle Board – but the creation of these notes never stops.
In trying to remind myself to keep Strategy, Implementation, and Results at the forefront of my thoughts, I began doodling a poster for myself.
The first doodle looked like this:
STRATEGY + IMPLEMENTATION = RESULTS = GROWTH = IMPACT
But, being the nerd that I am (I was teased in elementary school as being “Nerdy Nettie.” Now I will happily accept that title – LOL), there was a problem with the equation. I wasn’t adding the two elements together. It shouldn’t be:
STRATEGY PLUS IMPLEMENTATION
A better explanation is that we apply implementation to the strategy. And for that, I had to dust off my high school Algebra books and explore a little bit. This may not be a perfect application but what came to mind is that the Implementation is a Function of Strategy that yields Results, Growth, and Impact
Here’s what that equation looks like:
IMPLEMENT ∫(STRATEGY) = RESULTS = GROWTH = IMPACT
MathIsFun.com explains functions and how they work here:
So what we have is that Implementation is the function (f), and it is applied to the Strategy and equals Results. Without the implementation applied, results do not occur.
Our new equation looks like this:
I encourage you to download this image, print it, and hang it on your wall as a reminder that your strategy is nothing without implementation.
Over the next few weeks, we are going to continue to dig into other aspects of the Function of Implementation, including KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), Time Management, Energy Management, Reflection, Kaizen, and more – ultimately so that we can create results = growth = impact.
If you love exploring these ideas and would like to talk about them and how they apply to your business, join us for a CEO Networking Meeting where we explore big ideas while expanding our network.
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