Executing strategy for results

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

Enrollment preference given to Sloan Master of Business Administration students.

A recent survey of more than 400 global CEOs revealed that excellence in execution was the number one challenge facing corporate leaders in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, topping a list of 84 issues including innovation, geopolitical instability, and top-line growth. These executives are right to worry about execution. Between one-half and two-thirds of companies fall short when it comes to achieving their strategic priorities.

Strategy execution is important and difficult, so you might expect it to be a core concern in business schools. Despite its importance, strategy execution is not well understood. An amazon.com search for “business strategy,” produces 65,000 books, while “strategy implementation” and “strategy execution” together yield fewer than 2,000 books.

The dominant view of strategy execution is, at its heart, mechanistic. After setting a direction, top leaders manipulate “levers of control” to break their strategy into goals, assign these objectives down the hierarchy, measure progress, and reward performance. This approach, developed in an era when executives wore fedoras to work, is ill-suited to current market realities. Today, companies must balance strategic persistence with the agility to respond to unexpected changes—i.e., flexible execution (or flexecution for short). This course is organized around the seven components of the Flexible Execution model:

This course is designed for students who intend to work in general management positions in start-ups, large corporations, or not-for-profit organizations at some point in their career. The course will also be useful for students who plan to work as management consultants after graduation.

This course is designed to help MIT Sloan students bridge the gap between strategy and execution in four ways.

This class is offered pass/fail. To pass the course, student must complete the following requirements:

This course relies heavily on discussing and learning, from case studies and articles. We will spend a substantial portion of several class discussing the assigned case or article, an interactive process designed to surface multiple viewpoints, and debate their pros and cons. Given the cumulative nature of the course and the important role that classroom interaction plays, attendance is mandatory for every session. If you cannot attend a session, please notify the teaching assistant via email before the class commences. We will track class participation, and all students are expected to participate in our class discussion on a regular basis to pass the course.

For most classes, a brief pre-class survey will be distributed the day before class.

Twice during the course, students must submit a two-page memorandum of analysis and recommendations for a case study or assigned reading. These memos are a team assignment.

More details about these requirements can be found in the Assignments section.

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