Tools for Achieving Strategic Speed: Assessing Your Own and Your Organization's Strengths and Weaknesses and Determining Your Next Steps

By: Henry M. Frechette and Edwin H. Boswell and Jocelyn R. Davis

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Synopsis: Strategic speed is not about concocting brilliant strategies. It's about leaders who know how to accelerate strategy execution by adopting the right mind-set and taking the right actions-actions focused on mobilizing people. Strategic speed is where urgency meets execution, and that means you don't need to go into a bunker and spend months drawing up complex plans in order to see results. If you as a leader can think and behave in speed-promoting ways, your strategies can gain immediate traction. So where do you begin? In this chapter, the authors, all of whom are executives at The Forum, a global consulting firm, provide you with four tools for achieving strategic speed: the Time/Value Assessment, which will give you a visual sense of the strategic speed currently being achieved in your business unit; the Team Survey, a ten-minute questionnaire you can send out to members of your team or business unit that will tell you exactly how clear, unified, and agile they feel with regard to your strategic initiatives and enable you to identify trouble spots; the Leadership Profile, which will help you diagnose your organization's strengths and weaknesses in four key leadership practices; and the Speed Matrix, which will help you pull all the information together and prioritize your next steps in mobilizing your people and accelerating execution. This chapter was originally published as Chapter 7 of "Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution."