Turning aspiration into action

By Linda Julian

Strategy is great, but it's worth little without implementation.  Make certain you put the disciplines and resources in place to make your strategy happen.

You'll find plenty of talk about strategic business development planning, but the increasingly competitive professional services environment, where there is excess supply in many segments and services are becoming commoditised faster, you need to pay a whole lot of attention to excelling at execution.

Get yourself and your team together to perform your strategy  -  turn your business development aspirations into actions.

Here are some tips:

• if you're team leader, make sure you're not just recognising and rewarding imagination, inspiration, and excitement  -  reward getting it done
• recognise that your success may ultimately depend on micro managing low-level tasks  -  things like slipping letters into envelopes, spellchecking documents, proofreading, and so on
• be fierce about prioritising what it is going to get done today, as opposed to what is going to get started, underway, or progressed today  -  work out what needs to get finished and what that involves
• make lists to keep priorities firmly in mind.

Even the best marketing and business development ideas need to be turned into action.  If you don't execute your plans, clever strategy is worth little  -  your aspirations must turn into action.