Welcome to the Business Execution: Crafting a Strategy that Executes course. This is the second course of the Business Execution series.

Despite the amount of time spent on planning and strategy, businesses regularly fail to execute their strategic plans. Why is that? Executives must achieve continued growth and strategically manage costs, while skillfully navigating risk. These challenges often stand in the way of successfully executing strategic plans, creating a gap between vision and execution – a gap that must be bridged.

Successful strategy execution involves participation and coordination across all units of the business. Decisions made within the business units take place within a complex and multilayered organizational context of leadership, workforce, and culture.

The process used to execute strategy links strategy formulation and planning with operational execution. First, you define and develop the strategy. Next, you align people and operations with the strategy. And finally, you monitor and revise the strategy. This course focuses on the first stage – defining and developing executable strategic plans.

This course will give you the tools you need to define and develop strategy that executes. You'll learn how to define the strategy by clarifying the mission, vision, and values. You'll explore how to review the current situation and create strategy direction statements.

Then you'll find out how to select strategic initiatives based on themes and assign accountability to those initiatives. Finally, you'll learn how to translate initiatives into strategic targets and allocate resources to initiatives.

Without a focused plan, a business strategy will remain a vision. But by clearly defining what you want to achieve and developing strategically executable initiatives, you can bridge the gap between vision and execution.

That’s it! Now go ahead and push that “Take this course” button and see you inside the course!