Management education in the best institutes in the country and all over the world lays great emphasis on strategy development rather than execution. Management institutes have umpteen number of case study discussions on ‘what should be done’ rather than ‘how it should be done’.
Management students are trained to strategize, not execute. They are trained to understand complex management models, but never taught the basics of execution.
The curriculum also emphasizes on strategy formulation with courses relating to business strategy, marketing strategy etc. Various management games and cases at the school level encourage theoretical discussions and emphasis on ‘strategy formulation’. The need of the hour is to have dedicated courses that deal exclusively with execution; courses that look at what happens when the ‘rubber meets the road’.
It is not as if execution is totally absent, but given its vital necessity for business success , it has not been incorporated in a meaningful manner. Part of the problem also stems from background of many management students in India. Most of them are fresh from a degree and have little/no work experience to contribute meaningfully on discussions pertaining to implementation.
While this may not be a case in the western world (where the background of management students is more rich & diverse), there are no specializations offered in strategy execution. In the best institutes like Harvard or Wharton, things are beginning to change. However the emphasis still is on the first stage of execution which is planning.
The other challenge with including strategy execution in management education is the difficulty in offering it as an elective. Execution spans various disciplines. It includes aspects of business strategy development, people management, quality management, process management, customer analysis, leadership, organizational structure and alignment etc. etc.
So effectively it is program that integrates learning from all the other disciplines. The other problem is that the amount of management literature and case studies on the subject is also very limited.
So bright, freshly minted graduates have little or only a passing exposure to execution. This consequently translates to lot of mistakes, failures and underachievement in the area of execution in the real world. And these failures and underachievement contributes to the lot of value erosion in companies. Has anybody ever estimated the amount of value eroded by management failures on account of execution?
If one was to take into account that 80-85% strategies are not executed successfully, it seems that this wide gap in management education is contribution to billions of dollars of value erosion in the corporate world every year. It is really shocking therefore that the industry is not demanding a strong exposure to execution from the management institutes.
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