The book's theme as articulated in the introductory chapter is a good one: organizations often fail to implement their strategies due to failure to convert strategies into projects causing actual change.

I thought the authors' analysis of the steps to implement strategy was very thorough. I agreed with each step beginning with developing the organization's purpose in Part One to celebrating the end of projects as described in the end of the book.

With that said, the book seemed to target college professors rather than people who actually do this work in the corporate world. I found the authors difficult to follow. For example, corporate people who work with strategy would not use the words "ideation," "synthesis," and "domain."

To test my observation that the book was difficult to follow, I randomly selected three paragraphs totaling about 275 words from three different pages to test for readability using MS Word's "style and grammar checker" which provides a grade-level analysis and the Flesch Reading Ease score.

The major components of the Flesch Reading Ease score are average sentence length and average syllables per word. "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss scores a perfect 100. For most standard documents, they recommend a reading ease score of 60-70. Books for business professionals are usually in the 35-45 range. The three selections of "Executing Your Strategy" that I tested had a high score of 21 and a low score of six averaging 15.

Thus, ironically, while I think the authors conceptualized this project very well, the execution fell short of creating a book that is likely to attract the attention of people who are attempting to implement strategies in the corporate world.

Mark Morgan, Raymond E. Levitt and William Malek, a team with academic and hands-on experience at strategy execution, go directly to the heart of getting things accomplished. As they observe, the business scene is littered with the ruins of strategies that looked good on paper but failed the test of execution. Such failures often happen because strategic thinkers neglect project leaders. The authors clearly identify three "strategy-making imperatives" and three "project leadership imperatives," and explain how to implement them. They explain the pivotal need to align a project's structural elements. getAbstract believes that this book, which is generally well-written and pointed, with minimal jargon, will be valuable to any strategist or project leader.

In this volume, Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt, and William Malek focus their attention on "engaging in strategic project portfolio management for successful execution" and more specifically on the six domains of the strategic execution network, their acronym INVEST: Ideation (clarify and communicate purpose, identity and long- range intention), Nature (develop alignment between and among strategy, structure, and culture based on ideation), Vision (create clear goals and metrics aligned to strategy and guided by ideation), Engagement (engage the strategy via the investment stream), Synthesis (do projects and programs right, in alignment with portfolio), and Transition (transfer the projects and program outputs into operations where their benefits can be realized). Morgan, Levitt, and Malek devote a separate chapter to each. In the final chapter, they respond to a question their reader has no doubt by then asked: "Where should we start?" Although much (if not most) of this material examines strategy execution in an organization, the authors use Lance Armstrong as an example of how an individual can also "align all the [strategy-making] domains and invest every precious minute, and every personal resource, accordingly."

I was especially interested in the material provided in Chapter Three as the authors examine how to align an organization's culture and structure with its strategy. This is precisely the approach Louis Gerstner took after be assumed his duties as CEO of IBM. His mindset could be described as "outside-in" as he carefully determined how to achieve a strategic fit with IBM's external environment and then redefined his company's "nature." That is, he ensured that strategy, structure, and culture in the nature domain were in proper alignment with the ideation and vision domains. That is why IBM, previously a maker of branded products, redefined its "nature" to be that of a provider of custom integrated IT solutions for its global clients.

Morgan, Levitt, and Malek note that, in contrast, many strategists "focus on designing strategies that fit the external environment. They underestimate, as [Carly] Fiorina and the HP board appear to have done, the equally important issue of strategic fit with the internal environment. As [Mark] Hurd's early results revealed, the idea of combining with Compaq was not inherently flawed but misaligned with the nature of HP - its DNA as Gerstner would put it." I presume to add that, to a lesser extent, the same challenges await those companies that are considering a strategic alliance.

In the same chapter, they also examine four generic types of culture and agree with William Schneider (author of The Reengineering Alternative: A Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work) that in each of the four, its members share a dominant value. For example, "A competence culture believes in the `Field of Dreams' principle: make great products and people will flock to buy them. It values technical values above all else." The other types of culture are Collaboration (understanding the unique needs of customers), Cultivation (recruiting, retaining, and nurturing creative employees to produce unique products), and Control (low cost production of standard outputs).

Readers will appreciate the authors' skillful use of dozens of Tables and Figures throughout their lively narrative that consolidate key points. In Chapter 3, for example, the Tables illustrate "The four archetypes of organizational culture" (Page 101), Measure your organization's culture" (Page 135), "Measure you organization's structure" (Page 136), and "Measure your organization's strategy within the nature domain" (Page 137). In the same chapter, these are the Figures: "The nature imperative: Invest in projects to align culture, structure, and strategy" (Page 94), Align strategy with culture: Charting your culture egg" (Page 101), "The culture egg for a custom manufacturer" (Page 102), "Template for testing the alignment of strategy and culture" (Page 103), "HP's strategy-culture alignment map" (Page 103), "Formal matrix combines functional excellence with product/program focus" (Page 113), "Identify the apprriate alignment of strategy, structure, and culture" (Page 115), and "Achieving the nature imperative at DPR [Construction]: Aligning strategy, structure, and culture required careful ongoing investments" (Page 133). The other five chapters have equally informative Tables and Figures; also additional real-world examples of how some companies successfully executed strategies and other companies tried but failed to do so.

In the final chapter, the authors reiterate six imperatives of strategic execution (first displayed by Table 1.1 on Page 17 and then duplicated by Table C-1, Page 241), cite several real-world examples (e.g. Airbus and the perils of misalignment), discuss Lance Armstrong and the lessons to be learned from his successful execution of various strategies, and then pose what they call six "Acid Test Questions (on Pages 256-257) that could be read first, before proceeding through the Introduction and the six chapters. I wish I had done so because they provide an especially valuable frame of refernce for the wealth of information, insights, and recommendations that Morgan, Levitt, and Malek provide.

Their book is a brilliant achivement.

* * * * *

Those who share my high regard for it are urged to check out Schneider's aforementioned book as well as Lawrence Hrebiniak's Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change and Doing What Matters: How to Get Results That Make a Difference - The Revolutionary Old-School Approach co-authored by James Kilt with John Manfredi and Robert Lorder. Also A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan's The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis' Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson.

I must confess, even if you have the above intentions, you will need a lot of patience to read this book. One of the most eclectic, boring, dull and terribly academic books on the subject. The authors obviously are new to the subject of strategy that they hardly know the area. What they have obviously done was to cut and paste their expertise on project management on the topic of strategy and claim that they came up with a strategy formulation and execution methodology. Nonsense. It is a complete mess. It not only lacks in depth knowledge about strategy, but also very poor on coherence. It is just a meaningless patchwork. God save you, but if you make the mistake of implementing what is preached here, be sure that your organization will turn into a big mess and bankruptcy will be imminent. Avoid it at all costs.

It's hard to get positive about a management book that begins with a ridiculous quote: "There may be a thousand little choices in a day. All of them count." Ever hear of Pareto's Law?

The first paragraph then tells us that "The spectacular flameouts of Carly Fiorina at HP, John Akers at IBM, John Sculley at Apple, and Pehr Gyllenhammar at Volvo are merely a few high-profile examples among thousands of CEOs whose strategies fail every year because of poor execution."

But it's just not true. Gyllenhammar failed because his strategy (make factory jobs less repetitious, and more interesting) created higher costs and lower quality - especially vs. the Toyota Production System. Carly Fiorina failed partly because of her abrasive personality, poor focus (her management meetings were dreaded), and lack of a quantitative approach, but mostly because her focus on creating a single sales force created poor performance, reduced accountability, and high costs; similarly, keeping the PC and printer units together allowed the latter to cover up the former's weaknesses. John Akers made three enormous strategic errors - failing to see the future in manufacturing PCs (allowing Intel to create a commodity market that IBM was unable to add significant value to), allowing Microsoft to take over the market for PC software, and not moving to solidify IBM as an overall problem-solver instead of hardware seller. Finally, John Sculley wanted to destroy Apple's competitive advantage (its easier-to-use software and uniqueness) and become a commodity PC producer selling to large corporations.

Summarizing, "Executing Strategy" makes two unrecoverable blunders in the first half-page, goes on to conclude that "something like 90% of companies consistently fail to execute strategies effectively," and then focuses the next 260 pages on good execution (extremely likely, given its flaunting of Pareto's insights) of what are highly likely to be flawed strategies.

Readers would be much better served reading material that guides deciding what business their company is in (Drucker), determining the relative roles of low costs and high quality, fast new product development (possibly each has a role in differing areas of the company), fast operational change, and how to establish a sustainable competitive advantage.