Executing Your Strategy was published by Harvard Business School Press and written by two MGRUSH alumni.
This tightly woven book provides a formula and clear instruction on how to transform strategy into projects and activities. Authors Mark Morgan and William Malek (both ex-professors of Stanford University), spoke with us about the importance of professional facilitation to helping groups “plan your work” (strategy) and “work your plan” (project).
The INVEST Imperatives of Executing Your Strategy
Strategy Execution Framework
They frame a strong argument for their six INVEST imperatives (or, domains). You will find their phases quite valuable when managing your own program portfolios:
- Ideation—communicating purpose, identity, and intent
- Nature—aligning strategy with culture and structure
- Vision—clarity of goals and metrics
- Engagement—portfolio management
- Synthesis—program and project execution
- Transition—benefit to mainstream operations
From an our selfish perspective, they highly recommend building a Center for Strategic Excellence. The Center would anchor itself upon effective, neutral facilitators and structured meeting design. We hope you are doing your best across your departments to nurture facilitative leadership around you, your staff, and your program office. Their INVEST approach will help.
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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities every day during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.
Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)
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Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.
This specific post helped me a lot. The authors’ insight is much deeper about converting strategy into action. Thank you so much for this research!