From Strategy to Execution: Strategic Themes and Initiatives

The balance scorecard brings to strategy some new strategic concepts that complement the traditional ones. Thus, the main strategic concepts used in balance scorecard projects are the following:

• Mission: What do we do? and What is our business?
• Values: What is important to us?
• Vision: What do we want to be?
• Perspectives: Usually four perspectives (Finance, Customers, Processes, and Resources) are used to describe the strategic creation of value.
• Strategic map: It is a visual representation of the strategy showing the cause and effect chain of objectives among the four perspectives.
• Value proposition: What value we deliver to the customer?
• Strategy: It is the differentiated value proposition for customers. There are four well-accepted strategies: Low cost, Product leadership, Total customer solution, System lock-in.
• Strategic themes: There are hundreds of processes that create value. However strategic themes are just a very few critical processes important for the strategy chosen. It is said that the art of the strategy depends on the identification of those strategic themes. The strategic execution is around those themes.
• Objectives: It is what an organization must achieve to make its strategy succeed.
• Balance scorecard: Translate the objectives into key performance indicators and goals.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Measures to evaluate the success. Usually a balance scorecard has five to seven by perspective.
• Strategic initiatives: Those are specific actions that create the results. So the strategy execution depends on the strategic initiatives.

We have to stress two concepts from the turnaround point of view. Strategic themes is an important concept because means identified the key process, I mean the leverage process that are going to produce the expected turnaround results. The second concept that we would like to highlight is strategic initiatives because in order to be success with the implementation of the turnaround strategy the initiatives are the actions needed to move from strategy formulation to strategy execution.