Press Kit. Contents. Synopsis Author Bios Endorsements Third-party review Images

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1 Press Kit Contents Synopsis Author Bios Endorsements Third-party review Images For further information on this book and its authors, consult these web sites: TrueNorthPress.com MKBpartners.com Contact: Richard McKnight Phone: RMcKnight@mkbpartners.com 1

2 Synopsis Leading Strategy Execution How to Align the Senior Team, Design a Strategy-Capable Organization, and Get All Employees On-board By Richard McKnight, With Tom Kaney and Shannon Breuer 300 pages, with index. $24.95 Paper ISBN # Description Most approaches to strategy implementation fail because strategy is created at one level (the top) and handed off to another (the middle and bottom). Consequently, everyone is frustrated. To improve strategy implementation, you have to do what we call The Four Jobs of Strategy Execution and involve employees in creating and carrying out the strategy. Contents 1. Execution is Everything 2. Change or Die 3. The Human Side of Strategy 4. Winning Minds (Job One) 5. Winning Hearts (Job Two) 6. Aligning Local Effort (Job Three) 7. Designing Your Organization (Job Four) 8. Strategy Maps 9. Right People, Right Place, Doing the Right Things 10. Aligning the Senior Team 11. HR s Role in Strategy Execution 12. Leading Strategy Execution 2

3 The Authors Richard McKnight Richard (Rick) McKnight, PhD is the author of Victim, Survivor, or Navigator: Choosing a Response to Workplace Change. For the five years prior to co-founding McKnight Kaney Breuer, he was VP, Organizational Consulting at Right Management. Before that, he was self-employed for 20 years as a consultant to senior leaders in various Fortune 500 firms. Tom Kaney Tom has specialized in the strategic management of Human Resources and organizational change for over 20 years. He has been SVP Human Resources for Medarex, Inc., SVP Human Resources for GlaxoSmithKline NA, and a leader in HR at Subaru of America. Tom is widely acknowledged for his expertise in business strategy formulation and execution. Shannon Breuer Shannon has led enterprise-wide HR and communications initiatives in Fortune 100 firms for 20 years. As Director of Corporate HR and Communications for Sunoco, she established new talent management systems that directly link to strategy, created and installed mentoring and networking programs, and launched and managed the company s diversity strategy. 3

4 Endorsements In this book, McKnight, Kaney, and Breuer provide a highly useful, if not the antidote for the unacceptable failure rate of leaders. The research is clear: One out of every two persons in positions of leadership fails. The primary culprit is insufficient engagement of followers in strategy development and execution. W. Warner Burke, PhD, Chair, Department of Organization & Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University Any executive or manager concerned with strategy execution should read this book. The authors tell you how to build a comprehensive strategy execution roadmap that deploys strategy throughout the organization and fits the organization to it. Dan Phelan, Chief of Staff, GlaxoSmithKline This books puts it all together! It is pragmatic, readable, and realistic. The authors offer tools, stories, and sound advice based on their years of experience an exceptionally valuable read. Linda Ackerman Anderson, author of The Change Leader s Roadmap "A much needed resource that provides an enormously helpful set of ideas and applications that will enable individuals and teams to successfully navigate the murky waters of strategic planning. It is a rich and compelling road map of not only where to go but how to get there." James F. Grady, Ph.D., Senior Vice President Administration, California Casualty Management Company If you re looking for practical, clear advice on improving strategy implementation, read this book! Leading Strategy Execution offers clear, practical guidance on the most critical and difficult part of strategy engaging the organization in executing strategy to deliver those results. The measure of effective strategy is not whether you have the most brilliant ideas, but whether you deliver great results. Tom Mercer, VP, Strategy Management, GlaxoSmithKline 4

5 Third-Party Review Review of Leading Strategy Execution Leading Strategy Execution: How to Align the Senior Team, Design a Strategy-Capable Organization, and Get All Employees On-board By Richard McKnight, with Tom Kaney and Shannon Breuer. Foreword by Amy Kates, co-author with Jay R. Galbraith, of Designing Your Organization. Published by TrueNorth Press ISBN: pages. By Hadley Williams, MBA, PhD In these economic hard times everyone is trying hard to do more with less. Business leaders seem to be moving away from their customary enthusiasm for strategycreation and have become enamored with strategy-execution. This is not a time to change course, we hear many saying, Let s do what we have been doing even better. A new book by Richard McKnight and colleagues Tom Kaney and Shannon Breuer offers exceptionally useful guidance for doing so. One reason why this book is so valuable is because it reflects an appreciation of organization design as figural to strategy execution. Indeed, a foreword to the book is written by Amy Kates, co-author with Jay R. Galbraith, of Designing Your Organization. My clients have heard me say many times that, Every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it s currently achieving. To get more, better, different results, the design of the organization has to change. Organization design, as defined by this valuable book, is the process of configuring structures, processes, reward systems, and people practices to create an organization capable of achieving its business strategy. McKnight and colleagues provide tools by which to assess the goodness of fit of these elements with the strategy and provide guidance for teams that are responsible for retrofitting design and organization. This book would be a valuable resource if it stopped with an articulation of the role importance of organization design and related guidance for doing this work. But the book tells much more of the strategy execution story. 5

6 The essence of the book is this, a comprehensive story of strategy execution that has been heretofore unarticulated as clearly: 1. To execute a strategy, you first have to have one. (The book points out that what many OD practitioners know: many senior leadership teams have no strategy.) 2. Your strategy must be executable, i.e., it must state a value discipline and there must exist a plan to drive its achievement. (McKnight and colleagues use the Balanced Scorecard concept to define an executable strategy.) 3. An aligned senior team must drive strategy execution efforts. (The authors observe what the research in this area has demonstrated for years: the number one killer of strategy execution is a lack of alignment at the top.) 4. The senior leaders must accomplish what the authors call The Four Jobs of Strategy Execution : Job One: ensure that employees understand the strategy Job Two: engender emotional commitment to the strategy by employees Job Three: bring unit performance into alignment with the strategy Job Four: create strategy-compatible organization designs In their highly readable, illustrated book, the authors of LSE devote one chapter to each of the first three of the Four Jobs and devote two chapters to Job Four, what they admit is the most challenging of the four tasks. The book is rich with case studies that illustrate each concept. There are many valuable questionnaires and assessment devices included as well. This book was written for senior leaders with profit and loss responsibility, but I am speculating that its readers will mostly be the consultants who support them. In either case, it is clear, insightful, and above all, practical. The book contains two chapters written expressly for HR professionals, as well, one called HR s Role in Strategy Execution and another on talent management called Right People, Right Place, Right Results. It appears that I am not the only OD practitioner who finds this book valuable; it is endorsed by W. Warner Burke, one of the founders of our field. If I have a criticism of the book, it lies in my discovery that the last chapter perhaps should have been the first. This chapter lays out the whole strategy execution story step-by-step. If you read the book, take my advice and start there. 6

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