Revised (improved?) Introductory peice

The Map is Different from the Journey
In 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was President of the United States, the U.S. purchased the Louisiana Territory from France. This was a huge tract of over 800,000 square miles, taking in nearly the entire mid-section of North America from present-day Texas and Louisiana up to Montana and North Dakota. This almost doubled the size of the new country.

Much of the new territory was unexplored. Jefferson decided to send an expedition up the Missouri River to its source in the western mountains and beyond to the Pacific Ocean. So, he selected Meriwether Lewis, a man of “luminous and discriminating intellect”, to lead the expedition. In turn, Lewis chose his friend William Clark to be co-commander and, with Jefferson’s consent, the famous team of “Lewis and Clark” was born.

Jefferson hoped that the expedition would be able to find the elusive water route across the country, which would be a great boon to commerce. For hundreds of years, explorers had searched for a way to cross the continent by a water route, sometimes know as the Passage to India. The best thinking of the time said that the existence of this all water route was almost certain.

Not only was this the widely accepted thinking of the day, but there was actually a map that they could carry, the Nicholas King map - commissioned especially for their expedition and based on the very best geographic sources of the time.

Well supplied with a budget of nearly $2,500 (a space-launch sized sum for the day) and armed with the best information that could be collected, Lewis and Clarke set out simply to “fill in the empty spaces" of the map and to verify the fact Jefferson’s strategy of buying Louisiana Territory was, indeed, a stroke of instant world-power defining brilliance.

Their task was, in Jeferson’s own words, “to explore the Missouri River, and such principal streams of it, as, by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean…” If, along the way, they were to shed some light on the rumors of Wooly Mammoths and blue-eyed, Welsh speaking Indians, that would certainly be interesting, too.

As it turned out, the journey was very different from the map.

Lewis and Clark discovered that the Rocky Mountains were much more extensive and rough than expected and that the upper reaches of the Missouri River were not navigable. The supposed one-day portage was over 100 miles. It took the party 11 days on foot and horseback to cross the Bitterroot Mountains on the Lolo Trail, in an ordeal that almost cost them their lives. The hoped-for water route across the continent simply did not exist.

This was not what Jefferson hoped for, but to call the Lewis and Clarke expedition a failure would be ridiculous. Instead of following the map mindlessly as it proved to be wrong, they kept the goal of reaching the Pacific in mind and began to explore. They explored the river as it branched, they spoke with the natives and discovered a way to the ocean.

Instead of following an incorrect map, they began to map the territory, themselves. They learned of the native inhabitants, they learned of the soil and mineral deposits, they learned of the climate, the animal and plant life and the availability of water.

The map was different from the journey. Instead of discovering a water route to the orient, they discovered the American West – thousands of miles of arable land that, in time, would provide both vast wealth and needed space for the expanding nation.

Organizations today face similar challenges. The best plans, even those based on the best information and thinking will never be the journey, itself. As strategies are executed, situations shift, assumptions change, barriers are encountered and opportunities are revealed.

The best organizations, the ones that thrive in the face of change, understand that it takes both cartography and intelligent navigation to reach their organizational goals.

Strategy and Execution
"Strategy" - the key term in most management books - is a seductive word. From the Greek for "general," it conjures a picture of Alexander or Napoleon weighing the balance of forces, spotting a weak point, and delivering a startling masterstroke. If the global vision is right, we want to believe, execution of the merely "tactical" details can be left to lesser managers.

This is a book for executives who know better... who have seen too many promising strategies (others' and perhaps their own) go astray or come to nothing in execution. It argues that successful strategies always have an effective feedback loop from execution, that without constantly updated input from the organization's changing context, strategies are at risk of producing irrelevant results.

The uncomfortable truth is that with today's rapid business cycles and spiraling risks, no organization - no executive - can drive change with a crisp, simple "We are here... next year (or next decade) we must be there... and here are your marching orders." Wherever "there" is, it's a moving target.

However expert and up to date your map may be, new swamps and mountain passes will appear.

So what's the solution? Better business intelligence? A magic dashboard application that keeps the strategic planner up to date 24/7?

This book argues that the answer lies in something readily available; something that understands strategy and execution as not just inseparable, but as two views of a single dynamic reality; something that steers both away from risk and towards opportunity; something that is adaptive to foster innovation rather than hampering it and is agile to keep pace with a turbulent world; something that actually creates value.

You’ve heard of this something - you may even have done it once or twice. However, the profession surrounding this something has been evolving for decades and now begs to be reconsidered as the core strategic discipline of execution.

Building on a four-year, multi-million-dollar study in more than 70 corporations, agencies and NGOs on five continents, this book discusses how taking this something seriously and fitting it to organizational culture delivers both better day-to-day results and more long-term strategic value.

The something - is project management.

Yes, I’m serious.

As Michael Porter said, “The essence of strategy is in the activities - Otherwise, a strategy is nothing more than a marketing slogan…” There is simply no better way of identifying an organization’s strategy – its real strategy, not just the one that it talks about – than looking at the projects that were undertaken in the last two or three years.

Simply put, projects are what an organization does and project management is how projects are done.

Still, it seems that so much of what has been written recently about strategy only flirts with the word without actually daring to use it – dancing around it with terms like “integrated activities”, “strategic initiatives” and “execution”. It is as if the lowly word “project” was far beneath the interests of the executive.

Upon reflection, there can surely be no better evidence of the widespread and dangerous gap between strategy and execution – between thinking and doing- than this linguistic disconnect.

For all the fancy strategy-speak, it is only in the familiar "project" that strategy actually gains traction. The project is the thing that builds new products, expands markets, builds new value chains and transforms the organization. The portfolio of projects in which an organization invests defines its strategy, its future and its value.

And, the success of any strategy depends wholly on the ability of project management to execute it intelligently. Executives can no longer be satisfied with simply creating a map of the organization’s strategy and checking periodically to see that it is being executed “on time and on budget”. Of course these are important, but, like Lewis and Clarke, when the map is wrong, the journey is not abandoned - the new territory is explored new maps are drawn.

Project management, from this perspective, is strategy in real-time and when this is achieved, strategy begins to work.