October 16, San Mateo, CA—Three primary thought leaders from the world-renowned Stanford Advanced Project Management (SAPM) program are preparing to release Executing Your Strategy: How to Break It Down and Get It Done. Co-authored by Dr. Ray Levitt of Stanford University and IPS Professional Associates Mark Morgan and William Malek, this new book introduces six imperatives of strategic execution, showing how to break down strategy into doable chunks. Due for release in December 2007 by Harvard Business School Press, the book illustrates at a high level many of the solutions for aligning projects with business strategy covered by SAPM courses.

In Executing Your Strategy, the authors present six imperatives that enable organizations to do the right strategic projects—and do those projects right. And it is no accident that the six imperatives combine to create the acronym INVEST:

• Ideation: Clarify and communicate purpose, identity, and long-range intention
• Nature: Develop alignment between strategy, structure, and culture based on Ideation
• Vision: Create clear goals and metrics aligned to strategy and guided by Ideation
• Engagement: Do the right projects based on the strategy through portfolio management
• Synthesis: Do projects and programs right, in alignment with portfolio
• Transition: Move the project and program outputs into operations where benefit is realized

The INVEST model is a powerful way to generate the crucial conversations that allow people across the organization to establish better alignment between what is said, what is done and what is reinforced, bringing greater levels of strategic execution within reach of every organization.

Full of intriguing company examples and practical advice, this crucial new resource shows how to make strategy happen in any organization. The authors show how to identify and invest in the full range of projects and programs required to align an organization with its strategy by prioritizing strategic investments and assuring that needed resources are applied in priority order. Also key are revising the strategic portfolio to fit the demands of a dynamic environment and staying connected to strategic projects through completion, as new products, services, skills and capabilities are transferred into operations. In short, successful execution of strategy requires that leaders make a series of coherent investments that are in alignment with culture, structure, goals, metrics, identity, long-range intention, and purpose.

This book is written for mid- to senior-level executives to help them bridge the gap that exists in many organizations between the strategic intent developed by top management and the execution of that strategic intent by people at all levels of the organization, including project managers and team members. The book will also resonate with program and project managers who want to understand more clearly what their organization’s strategy is so they can make better decisions about how to execute it and more effectively communicate the status and challenges of strategy execution to their managers.

Executing Your Strategy can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com and other leading booksellers.

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