Strategy-Aligned Management: Keys to Strategy Execution

Bill Barberg
President
Insightformation, Inc.

Strategy-Aligned Management (SAM) is an integrated approach to leveraging a variety of established tools and techniques that address the refining, communicating, managing and executing organizational strategy. In recent decades, many organizations, academics and consultants have wrestled with how to bridge the gap between a strategy and the successful execution of that strategy. The most influential work in this space has been done by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, who introduced the concept of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) in the early 1990s. The BSC may have ended up as just another disappointing 3-letter management fad, but Kaplan and Norton continued to refine and expand the concept as they learned from organizations who embraced the approach. In their subsequent books, The Strategy Focused Organization, Strategy Maps, and Alignment, Kaplan and Norton built on the initial Balanced Scorecard concepts and added powerful new tools and concepts that have proven to be tremendously valuable to organizations of nearly any size and type. Most of the core concepts in Strategy-Aligned Management are the latest "best principles" that have developed around the Balanced Scorecard methodology. If you don't have a solid understanding of how the BSC methodology has evolved in the last several years, don't miss this valuable update! (Hint: It's no longer primarily about measures or scorecards that are balanced.)

But Kaplan and Norton don't have a monopoly on good ideas about how to execute strategy and improve performance through organizational alignment. Other thought leaders have contributed greatly to the field of strategy-focused management tools and techniques. Rather than seeing these as conflicting frameworks with inconsistent terminology and techniques, SAM has extracted valuable concepts and then grafted them into the BSC-based core and adapted the terminology to be consistent with that of the BSC.

Strategy-Aligned Management is not just management theory. It provides practical tools and templates that can be adopted by organizations or consultants seeking to align around strategy, execute their plans, or to upgrade their BSC to reflect powerful new principles for enhancing alignment and performance. SAM also includes an approach to incorporating technology. Software designed specifically to support the core concepts of SAM helps streamline and support the task of improving organizational alignment and executing strategy.

In this session you will learn the following:

• Important improvements (and misconceptions) in the BSC methodology
• Key principles of Strategy-Aligned Management
• Practical tools to enhance your existing BSC or scorecard efforts
• How a variety of types of organizations are benefiting from SAM.
• How SAM-focused software differs from traditional dashboard or scorecard software

Consultants will learn how to improve the value they bring to their clients in a variety of ways:

• Strategy consultants will learn how to improve the execution of the strategic plans they help create.
• Consultants who do BSC-related consulting will learn about innovations, principles and tools to elevate their practices and differentiate themselves.

Participants in this session will also learn about valuable resources for deepening their understanding about SAM (or sharing it with others in their organizations).

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