Strategic Management:

Strategy Implementation

Impediments To Strategy Implementation

What Makes Strategy Implementation So Difficult

Most Important Impediments To Strategy Implementation

• Functional Mindset. The biggest impediment to strategy implementation is the traditional functional mindset of many senior executives. Changing only one or two things seldom brings any significant overall organizational change. There are no "magic bullets" that would change entire organizations.

• Lack of Cross-functional Expertise and Efforts.  Lack of cross-functional excellence and cross-functional management on the part of the strategic leader and the management team respectively will not allow them to address all the interdependent issues effectively.

• Lack of Systems Thinking and Action. Everything is connected to everything else. You can never do just one thing. Changing one strategic element  has a ripple effect that impacts other parts of corporate strategy, which in turn have their own ripple effects, and so on. Further, to translate a strategic plan into actions that bring desired organizational outcomes requires incorporating numerous variables:  organizational arrangements, social factors, individual behavior, processes, and technology.

Lack of systems thinking – the ability to see business as a whole including the many different types of relationships between the many elements in a complex system – is thus a major impediment to successful strategy implementation.

• Organizational Resistance To Change. Strategy implementation is inextricably connected with organizational change. All organizations resist change and try to maintain the status quo, sometimes even if it yields unsatisfactory results.

• Lack of Strategic Motivation. Without strategic motivation, without the organization's enthusiastic involvement and participation of inspired employees, it is impossible to implement any strategic plan.

• Inability To Adapt To Rapidly Changing Environment. Rapidly changing business environment makes past strategic decisions obsolete rather quickly. Inability to revise the strategy continuously, learn from feedback and reassess past decisions is at the core of many strategy implementation failures in today's economy.