Speaker 1: Leaders today need both the ability to craft the right strategy and the skills to implement it. But unbelievably the rate of strategy implementation failures is increasing not decreasing. Strategy implementation is a relatively new subject in business and as such the current generation of leaders have been taught how to plan but not how to implement. For example those of us who attended a business degree of course we had a professor in strategy but very few of us if any had a professor in strategy implementation. As a result of this we've created a strategy implementation skills gap and this skills gap is a key contributor to why over two-thirds of implementations are failing based on our 20 years of research. We've also identified two other very important messages. One leaders habitually repeat past mistakes. Despite knowing the high failure rate leaders continue to adopt the same methodology they used previously and unbelievably they don't make any changes to their approach. As Einstein famously said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. A good practice for leaders is at the initial stage of their implementation to identify why it has failed in the past and then apply those lessons to the new implementation to make sure it succeeds. Another key outcome from our research is that we identified that organizations lack the required discipline for implementation. Changing your strategy by default means changing the way your employees work and asking them to work differently by simply attending a 45-minute launch of the new strategy will not have the impact. What does have the impact is when employees are hearing the message and it's being reinforced daily by giving them the support and encouragement to take the new actions. It takes discipline to make this happen and it's something that many organizations lack. It's similar for an individual that when they're training for a marathon or becoming fit in the gym it's not about doing it once a month or once a week it has to become a daily routine or a daily discipline. We define strategy as the choices an organization makes and implementation is about taking the right actions and taking the right actions means having that discipline to focus on what is adding value to implementing the new strategy. It also involves identifying what is not adding value and what should stop being done within the organization. It's essential to do this so that you can stop taking the actions that are distracting you from your success and also to free up the space and the time for employees to adopt the new actions. Peter Drucker taught us that this is called purposeful abandonment. But they also need to know what the strategy is and incredibly from our research only 5% of employees can define their own organizational strategy. If employees don't know what the strategy is how can they identify the right actions to take? Consider this puzzle. Five birds sit on a fence, three decide to leave. How many birds are left on the fence? I've asked this question to different leaders around the world and typically I receive the answers zero, two or five. The correct answer is five. Why? They attended a phenomenal two-day leadership program discussing what to do to implement the strategy. On the first Monday of every month they had a conference call discussing how to implement the new strategy but they never took the right actions. They only decided. What makes the high failure rate in strategy implementation even more frustrating is that leaders know what they need to do differently but somewhere between thought and action their good intentions become lost. We discovered early on that leaders were missing a framework to guide them through their organization's implementation journey. In 2004 I introduced the implementation compass. The framework highlights the eight areas where organizations need to focus to achieve their implementation.