Aligning Strategy and Sales

11

Company Environment

Building Human and Organizational Capabilities

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is an assertion made by many executives, because it points to realities in implementation. Consider the first situation in figure 11-1: a firm with a great strategy that it cannot implement well. If a tree falls in the forest and no one was there to hear it, was there a sound? That question has vexed great thinkers. But in business, which is a performance art, the answer is clear: there was no sound and the business is a failure—or, in street-smart parlance, nothing happens until you make a sale. By contrast, consider a firm with an average strategy—a coherent alignment of objective, scope, and advantage but not a strategy likely to be ...