The "One Strategy" Destination

According to Marco Iansiti, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, every corporation has two strategies: "Explicit" strategy is the one you read about in your company's planning memos and PowerPoint slides. The second, "implicit" strategy, is what emerges when middle managers and line employees attempt to execute the explicit strategy.
Unfortunately, these strategies often diverge. They are not aligned. And so the potential of the enterprise becomes unrealized.Strategy therefore becomes ...






"Strategy therefore becomes the product of the firm's incentives, structures, and patterns of behavior, not the other way around," writes Harvard Business School professor Marco Iansiti, an expert on innovation, entrepreneurship, and operations."Our past is littered with firms that failed to adapt to competitive changes," Iansiti says in an interview with HBS Working Knowledge. "Obtaining One Strategy in times of change means the organization will respond in a holistic fashion to new challenges, staying aligned for maximum competitive impact." Professor Marco Iansiti and Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky discuss a "One Strategy" approach to aligning plan and action.

Key concepts on how to develop strategies that are aligned with execution in a rapidly changing competitive environment include:

• ·   "Strategic integrity" occurs when the strategy executes with the full, aligned backing of the organization for maximum impact.
• ·    The chief impediment to strategy execution is inertia.
• ·    The One Strategy approach is less about formal reviews and more about one-on-one conversation.