If organizations invest so much time and effort crafting strategic plans to gain market leadership, why do they do such a poor job executing them? The old axiom "What gets measured gets done" applies here. According to Mankins (2005, p. 2) "less than 15% of companies make it a regular practice to go back and compare" their actual performance to their long-term strategic plans. Those organizations that track their strategic performance typically do so in a piecemeal fashion via a myriad of disparate business applications.

Many of these organizations rely on legacy ERP or HRIS systems for the basic information. Unfortunately, these applications do not support the essential needs demanded by an organization seeking to monitor the effectiveness of their strategy execution process.

Effective strategy execution begins with viable strategy. A viable strategy is concisely defined, within the organization's core competencies and achievable based on their available resources. The viable strategy must be translated into specific tasks and resource plans that each associate in the organization is held personally accountable for achieving.

In most cases, organizations do a poor job communicating their strategy much less translating it into lower level associate accountabilities. Consequently, poorly guided actions rarely produce the intended results. Associates throughout the organization simply do not know what they are expected to do or when they are supposed to do it. Finger pointing becomes rampant when associates are not assigned tasks or if the assigned tasks are beyond their capabilities to achieve them. No one can be held accountable for the shortfall in performance referred to as the strategy execution gap. The strategy execution gap is exposed annually and often becomes the basis for the following year's strategic plan.

Another insidious problem resulting from an organization's failure to close their strategy execution gap is the inability to differentiate a good plan from a bad one. Obviously, the strategy execution gap confirms that current plans are not being executed effectively. However, a compounding problem occurs when management cannot determine whether the root cause of the strategy execution gap is due to "poor planning, poor execution" (Mankins, 2005, p. 2) or a combination of both. Failure to determine the root cause of a strategy execution gap greatly reduces the organization's chances of closing it.

Finally, the strategy execution gap results in an underperforming organizational culture. Everyone in the dysfunctional organization knows that the poorly communicated strategic plans will not be executed. Failure to execute strategic plans results in a total lack of commitment. When everyone is responsible, no one is accountable. Promises to complete poorly assigned tasks are routinely broken without adverse consequences. Management cannot tell their star performers from the unaccountable slackers.