Strategy execution has far more potential for value creation than does strategy formulation. This book offers a complete tool kit to help firms achieve world-class strategy execution status. It focuses on initiative management, aligning executive, operating, and support processes with market rhythms, the seven stages of business growth, and time-phasing initiatives with the competitive realities of the firm's environment. It also demonstrates how to track the ripple effects of change throughout the organization. By emphasizing market rhythm, which is four to five times faster than how often a firm's best customers buy (the buying cycle), this concept of strategy execution seeks to ensure that the processes of established firms will be freed from their ineffective, out-of-sync status. How? By showing how and why all executive, operating and support processes must become prioritized, aligned, linked and synchronized (PALS) with the firm's unique market rhythm. A culture of world-class execution cuts through the clutter, confusion, and wasted time more effectively than the complex change techniques being used in many firms today.

Numerous exhibits portray tools that can be used by firms to develop world-class strategy execution prowess. A glossary of new terms and new definitions of familiar terms is included, along with a diagnostic survey that a firm can use to assess its current status regarding its world-class strategy execution abilities. The authors also provide a 10-S model of management imperatives that updates the McKinsey 7-S model from the 1980s. If a firm has been bogged down for too long in strategy formulation, now is the time to begin the execution phase-using this book as a starting point will give any organization the advantages it needs to launch this initiative successfully.

WILLIAM R. BIGLER, JR., is President and Founder of S10 Technologies and the Strategy Execution Institute.

MARILYN NORRIS is Founder and Principal of 21st Century Resources.