Closing the Strategy-to-Performance Gap: Techniques for Turning Great Strategy Into Great Performance

Everyone knows that great strategy can’t produce great performance without great planning and execution. Yet companies routinely fall short of the financial results spelled out in their strategic plans. In fact, our research suggests that companies typically deliver less than two-thirds of their strategy’s performance potential and, more importantly, that the causes of this "strategy-to-performance gap" are all but invisible to top management. Not surprisingly, then, leaders often pull the wrong levers in their attempts to turn performance around – they press for better execution when what’s really needed is a better strategy, or they opt to change direction when they really need to focus the organization more sharply on execution. The result: wasted energy, lost time and continued underperformance.