What is strategy work for you?

First and foremost, strategy work is about setting the overall direction for the company, which then needs to be broken down into concrete strategic initiatives.

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Strategy work involves making tough decisions—making choices and trade-offs regarding what to prioritize. Next, you must ensure that the necessary resources and support are put behind what you choose to focus on. Strategy is about having the courage to make choices, which are often difficult.

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Once the strategic choices are made and the direction is set, strategy work is about creating coherence across the organization so that everyone is working towards the same goal.

What is the biggest challenge in your strategy work?

Even though we were very mindful of focusing during the strategy process, we still haven’t been successful enough in prioritizing and putting the necessary resources behind what truly makes a difference. We still have too many priorities. We need to be even sharper. I would have liked to have set expectations more clearly before we began. We needed to be even clearer that not everything would make the cut when someone presents four or five good ideas they’ve worked on intensively and passionately—everyone thinks their idea is the most important, and leadership needs the courage to choose and, more importantly, to say no. Criteria for prioritization need to be even clearer going forward.

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Strategy work takes time, but you have to be careful not to let it drag on too long. In my view, developing the strategy should take no more than three months. By then, you know what you need to know. After that, it’s all about getting started with implementation. I think we’ve been good at that.

How do you manage your strategy?

In our latest strategy work, we involved the organization much more and much earlier than we had in the past, going deeper into the organization to define concrete strategic initiatives. This has created a sense of ownership throughout the organization, and there’s very little we do that isn’t directly rooted in our strategy. Those who are responsible for implementing the strategy must be deeply involved in its formulation.

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The strategy must be simply formulated so it can be communicated; otherwise, the organization won’t be able to act on it. Core messages need to be repeated again and again. At the start of the rollout period, we did this through roadshows and broad communication to the entire organization, where the strategy was presented in a clear, straightforward way.

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After that, it is important to continually talk about your strategy when following up on business and operations, as this brings the strategy to life in a completely different way. The strategy and operational management should be closely connected.

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There should be clearly defined and concrete objectives with assigned responsibilities, which are regularly followed up on. Some strategies are too visionary, vague, and unmanageable, and then it’s not a real strategy in my view.

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Eighty percent of the strategy should be implemented within operations—in my experience, if you manage to integrate the majority of the strategy into operations, it becomes much stronger and more effective. And it’s perfectly fine for 20% to take the form of actual development projects outside of operations, where teams work for a maximum of three months, after which solutions and initiatives are integrated into operations so that ownership is established throughout the organization.

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We’ve provided all leaders with a boost through a leadership development program as a lever for understanding and, most importantly, realizing the strategy. If you want to execute effectively, you need to build a strong culture of empowerment that ensures leaders and employees have the responsibility and mandate to think and work strategically. Culture alone isn’t enough; there also need to be structures and frameworks in place to ensure progress in terms of strategy work.

What recommendations do you have for others in order to succeed in the strategy work

• Involve those responsible for implementing the strategy as early as possible.
• Make 80% of the strategy an integrated part of operations across the entire organization.
• Create an execution culture that genuinely empowers and mandates leaders and employees.