【正文】 Everywhere Peter turned people, departments—whole business units—simply didn’t “get it.”First surprise: Engineering. The group had cut product design time 30%, meeting its goal to increase speedtomarket. Good. Then Peter asked how manufacturing would be affected. It turned out the new design would take much more time to make. Total cycle time actually increased. “Our strategic plan message is not really getting through,” Peter thought.Second surprise: Sales. The new strategy called for a shift—emphasize high margin sales rather that pushing product down the pipeline as fast as possible. But just about every salesperson Peter spoke to was making transactional sales to highvolume customers。 performance management meetings。 HIGHLIGHT SECTION 3。s directives, adds Ginsberg, they would never have followed through.Ginsberg, who helps IBM business units clarify and execute strategy, knew the key was to get the scientists talking to each other. So he coached the vice president to change her behaviors. Rather than hand out directives, he suggested ways she could stimulate team dialogue about how to meet objectives. Ginsberg also counseled other team members about the need for a consensus process on an interdependent team.They all got it. At the next meeting the VP said, Our mandate is to create breakthrough products. Without access to talent at the top universities, we won39。 Series 1 and Series 2 must be removed. Also, scale needs to be 1100]Topperforming panies believe that welldifferentiated rewards—even forced ranking of employe。 won’t, because they find it unfortable to give candid feedback。s ideas to advance their own. Getting them to work jointly and be held accountable for business results was going to be very difficult.In the first group meeting, the vice president simply assigned accountabilities to the various team members. I could see the scientists digging in their heels, says Harris Ginsberg, an internal leadership consultant who attended the meeting. No one was going to dictate to them what they should do. Even if they39。 Young. Based on a study conducted by Sarah Mavrinac and Tony Siesfeld for the Ernst amp。 and 2) engage in regular performance dialogue to monitor behavior and ensure it is aligned with strategy. Three keys to managing performanceA culture of dialogue doesn’t happen instantly, any more than a fluid tennis stroke does. It takes practice, persistence and hard work. So how exactly can leaders ensure that strategy messages go all the way down the line—that the tennis ball gets hit correctly? The three keys to managing performance effectively are:1. Achieving radical clarity by decoding strategy at the top. Many organizations think they send clear signals but don’t. In some cases, managers subordinate broad strategic goals to operational goals within their silos. That’s what happened with Peter’s top team. Elsewhere, top team members often have too many “top” priorities—we’ve seen as many as 100 in one case—which results in mixed signals and blurred focus. Strategy decode requires winnowing priorities down to a manageable number—as little as five. 2. Setting up systems and processes to ensure clarity. Once strategy is clear, organizations must create processes to ensure that the right strategy messages cascade down the organization. These include: strategycentered budget and planning sessions。 hardly anyone was building relationships with the most profitable prospects. Sales is doing just what it’s always done, Peter thought. Worst surprise: Even his top team, the people who’d helped him craft the strategy, was not sticking to plan. Peter asked a team member: “Why are you spending all your time making sure the new machinery is working instead of developing new markets?”“Because my unit’s chief goal was to improve ontime delivery,” he answered. “But what about pany goals?” said Peter. “We came up with a good plan and municated it very clearly. But nowhere it isn’t being carried out. Why?”Many organizations create good strategies, but only the best execute them effectively. Fortune magazine estimates that when CEOs fail, 70% of the time it’s because of bad execution. “Why CEOs Fail,” by Ram Charan and Geoffrey Colvin, Fortune magazine, June 21, 1999. Weak execution is pervasive in the business world, but the reasons for it are largely misunderstood. Why is it that no one in Peter’s organization was acting in sync with the strategy? Unless we understand the reasons, we can’t hope to solve the problem.Imagine someone hitting a tennis ball. When the brain says “hit the ball,” it doesn’t automatically happen. The message travels through nerve pathways down the arm and crosses gaps between the nerve cells. These gaps, or “synapses,” are potential breaks in the connection. If neurotransmitters don’t carry the message across the gap, the message never gets through, or it gets distorted. When that happens, either the arm doesn’t move at all, or it moves the wrong way.Creating a “culture of dialogue”Just like a nervous system, organizations also have gaps that block and distort messages. The secret to effective strategy execution lies in crossing hierarchical and functional gaps with clear, consistent messages that relay the strategy throughout the organization. Sound simple? It’s not. The reason is that the “neurotransmitters” in organizations are human beings—executive team members, senior managers, middle managers and supervisors—whose job it is to make sure that people’s behavior is aligned with the overall strategy. Doing what it takes to achieve alignment is very difficult. It is what Ram Charan calls, the “heavy lifting” of management, and it’s the key to executing strategy. As we’ll see later, there is an important difference between panies that successfully align behavior with strategy and those that do not. Companies that effectively execute strategy