INTRODUCTION

Putting Strategy into Action

You have an exciting day ahead. At 9:00 you’re leading a cross-department brainstorming session to generate new ideas for what your company needs to do to get ahead of regulatory changes that are coming to your industry. At 10:00 you’re sitting in on a bimonthly group that reviews the progress of the dozen innovation projects your department is running. And at 1:00, you’ll be presenting the business case to your unit leaders to spearhead a pilot program to make your company culture more friendly to working parents.

All three of these are examples of strategic initiatives, and your schedule is full of them. Each meeting is with a different team that has been assembled specifically for this task. Perhaps none of these are your “day job.” As a manager, you could be playing any role in an initiative on any given day. You might be championing your employee’s idea across your department or pitching your own proposal to senior executives. You might be a team member or a team leader on a cross-functional project. You might be the one fighting for more funding for a program or part of the committee that decides whether a program should be cut.

Managing initiatives requires you to keep the big picture and the little details in your head at the same time, thinking like a project manager one minute and a CEO the next. To manage initiatives successfully, you need to learn how to choose them, launch them, sustain them, and shut them down if they’re no longer effective. Whether you’re a manager pitching your first signature program or an executive overseeing an established project portfolio, this book will provide you with the tools, tips, and practical advice you need to run initiatives effectively and put your company’s strategy into action.

What Is a Strategic Initiative?

An initiative is a project or program outside a company’s routine operational activities that is meant to help the company achieve its strategy. Initiatives include such things as instituting change, creating a capability, improving performance, streamlining a process, balancing the needs of current economic conditions with the future, raising customer satisfaction, increasing employee retention, or ensuring regulatory compliance.

Initiatives follow a number of common steps at any organization, though the formal structure around each step will differ based on the size and culture of your company.

• Idea generation. Ideas at your company might come directly from executives or may be solicited from employees. Inspiration may come via group brainstorms or solitary eureka moments. They may spread through formal channels or through hallway chats. No matter how the ideas for initiatives come about, for them to progress, they need a shepherd to tend them and push them forward toward implementation.
• Building a business case and presentation to decision makers. This step consists of the legwork in fleshing out the idea, collecting needed data, running the numbers, getting feedback from stakeholders, winning over supporters, and pitching to decision makers.
• Evaluation, approval, and prioritization. Your organization should have a clear and fair process for evaluating initiative proposals and then accepting or rejecting them. Once they’re approved, they are prioritized or put into classes or categories to make clear which are most and least critical to the company.
• Launch, implementation, and learning. The prework is done, and the initiative has the green light—act. Secure the funding you need and assemble your all-star team. The initiative is now a project to be managed effectively and monitored until it is showing the results you’ve promised. And whether or not the initiative is a hands-down success or a disappointment, you need to capture what you’ve learned throughout the process and communicate it to stakeholders.

These steps may all seem simple enough, but initiatives don’t exist in isolation. Two more ongoing processes should be taking place throughout an initiative’s life cycle:

• Review of the company’s portfolio of initiatives. Effective organizations should frequently look at all of the initiatives that are happening in the company (or unit, or department) together, to make sure they are reaching milestones, continuing to meet business needs, and are reprioritized accordingly. Are any initiatives redundant? Are any more valuable in aggregate than they would be in isolation? Underperforming initiatives should be identified, their given assistance or cut. Resources are limited, and not every strategically worthy project can be funded—initiatives that aren’t meeting business needs should be killed to make way for others.
• Alignment of strategy and execution. “Alignment” isn’t a static characteristic or a box to be checked before an initiative is approved—it’s part of an ongoing process that will ensure your projects continue to further strategic goals in a changing environment, perhaps quarters or years after launch. Initiatives are the strongest tools your organization has to execute its strategy. You can’t ensure that your initiatives are actually supporting your company’s strategy unless you are frequently confirming that there’s no gap between strategy and execution.

This framework applies to just about any initiative in any industry. Now that you have the basics down, let’s dive into the challenges.

Why Is Managing Initiatives So Difficult?

Leading a strategic initiative requires all of the management skills you use in your day-to-day work, but brings additional challenges: navigating the office politics of gaining approval and getting funded, keeping support of your project from crumbling, overcoming resistance to change, leading without formal authority, building up teams quickly, course-correcting on the fly, and making the changes that you’ve pioneered stick—just to name a few. Plus add in the stress of knowing that having your name on a successful initiative—or a flop—could have a big effect on your career track.

Meanwhile, many organizations don’t make it easy for their managers. Companies of all kinds struggle with their strategic initiatives. Some put up too many bureaucratic obstacles to allow initiatives to get off the ground, while others launch too many and spread their resources too thin. Initiatives proceed to implementation without business cases or success metrics. Band-Aid initiatives and unfunded mandates proliferate. Inadequate portfolio review allows pet projects and underperforming initiatives to go on for too long, spreading resources thin and starving more-worthy projects. The financial costs to the company and the human toll in the form of frustration, burnout, and turnover can be severe.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The practices covered in this book can help you and your company find greater success as you manage initiatives, while using processes that are fair, sustainable, and effective.

What This Book Will Do

The HBR Guide to Managing Strategic Initiatives provides you with the knowledge, tips, and tools you need whether you are leading an initiative, championing your employee’s project, overseeing an initiative portfolio, or just have a great idea to push your company’s strategy forward. The five sections in this book will give you a good idea where to start. You can begin at section one if you’re at an early stage, or jump in later if your initiative is already off the ground.

From idea to pitch

This section focuses on the work you need to do to when you have a great idea for an initiative, whether or not your company has a formal approval process. It begins with an overview on winning support for your project, covering how to get people on board, how to work with a champion on the review committee, how to secure funding, and what to do if your idea doesn’t take off. Chapter 2 covers mistakes to avoid in order to prevent the disappearance of support for your initiative. The third article in the section explains what you should do next after you’ve presented the case for your initiative to decision makers—whether you’ve heard yes, no, or something in between.

Evaluating and prioritizing a portfolio of initiatives

Initiatives need to be evaluated both on their own merits and on how they contribute to the company’s strategy—and even if you’re not the one making the call on whether a proposal makes the cut, it’s important that you know how and why higher-ups in your organization are making these decisions. Chapter 4 describes a rigorous and rational process of evaluating which projects to implement that can be used at the department or unit level, or across the company. Next, “A Better Way to Set Strategic Priorities” shows a fair, transparent way to deal with trade-offs when resources become limited. “Too Many Projects” explores how initiative overload can lead to poor-quality work and burnout, and includes a list of questions to ask before you launch any initiative. And chapters 7 and 8 explore best practices for reviewing your company’s portfolio of initiatives, monitoring each project actively for health and strategic fit, and thinking like an investment manager to keep the portfolio balanced and diversified.

Launching and implementing initiatives

Once you have the go-ahead, you want to get up to speed quickly and avoid stumbling when moving into the implementation stage. “New Project? Don’t Analyze—Act” teaches you to embrace lessons from serial entrepreneurs—to act, learn, and build fast to get your initiative off the ground. Chapter 10 is a five-step refresher on project management to make sure your team is staying on top of deadlines, keeping stakeholders informed, and managing changes to the initial plan. Next, “Building a Transformative Team” will help you look at whether you have the right mix of players to thrive in uncertainty. Chapter 12 covers how to bring together experts to solve problems they may be encountering for the first and only time, sharing their learnings with your company while they’re executing. Finally, chapter 13 describes how to use the technique of rapid-results initiatives to break large, long-term initiatives into short-term projects distributed among numerous teams.

Maintaining momentum and overcoming challenges

Many initiatives will hit common roadblocks. Teams fail to gel, critical members are lost, early predictions prove wrong, attention wanders amid competing initiatives, underperforming programs limp along, champions lose their attention. This section will help you deal with these challenges to keep initiatives moving forward successfully. Chapter 14 will aid you in re-centering yourself and your team if your project isn’t finding its groove in the execution stage. “Learning in the Thick of It” shows how before-action reviews and after-action reviews can help you stay on track and sense when change is needed. The next two chapters explain how to avoid problems when handing off a project from one team to another and provide techniques leaders can use to prevent process improvements from backsliding when the next change initiative comes. Finally, since healthy initiative portfolio management means that not every initiative that is started will be completed, the last article in the section shows how “exit champions” can ensure the right projects are killed to make room for more-worthy investments.

Keeping strategy and execution aligned

While strategic alignment might not seem as urgent as the deadline-driven, day-to-day challenges of implementation, ignore it at your own risk. If your project is misaligned with your company’s strategy, it may be in danger of being cut at any moment. And if your company’s portfolio of initiatives is full of scattershot projects that aren’t advancing the strategy, your whole company could be in trouble soon. You can read the articles in this section any time—they are equally relevant at any stage of an initiative. Chapter 19 discusses four tensions that characterize any execution effort and provides guidance on how to navigate them. The next chapter demonstrates how the best companies close the strategy-to-execution gap by using agile, test-and-learn approaches. Finally, “Your Strategy Has to Be Flexible—But So Does Your Execution” explores the dangers of thinking about strategy and execution as two separate tasks.

Managing initiatives will never be simple—that’s why leaders who run them effectively will see themselves rising through the ranks, and organizations that oversee a healthy portfolio of initiatives will surpass their competitors. The advice in this book can ease the challenges, help you avoid common pitfalls, and help you move your company and your career forward. You’ll learn to lead projects and navigate uncertainty with greater confidence, overcome roadblocks, avoid initiative overload, and put your company’s strategy into action. Let’s get started.