Terry Flood believes in having a strong strategic plan.
That really isn’t a remarkable statement. Any leader who wants to build and sustain a successful business needs a focused vision for the company’s future and a workable plan for how to arrive at whatever the goal may be.
But a lot of businesses seem to stop there. They put together a grand strategic plan and lag on the execution of the plan. Where other companies stop, Flood is just getting started at Logicalis Inc., where he is the president and CEO of the $500 million, Detroit area-based U.S. arm of British technology solutions company, The Logicalis Group.
“The biggest challenge for any leader is execution,” Flood says. “Most good business leaders sit down and take a really hard look at strategy, because you have to have a strong strategy. But what they do — and what I’ve done in the past — is to spend a lot of time on the strategic plan, but once that strategic plan is done, we congratulate ourselves on that and forget about execution.”
To ensure that action follows the talking and thinking phases of planning, Flood and his leadership team have implemented processes, measurements and checkpoints aimed at keeping the strategy ball rolling from planning to implementation.
Each year, there is still plenty of work to be done at the conference room table. The leaders of Logicalis meet and re-evaluate the strategic plan to make sure it is still relevant to the company and the markets it serves. But from there, Flood and his managers enlist the help of the workers in the field to ensure that the strategy is carried out and goals are met.
“You have to constantly support the plan, reinforce the plan and certainly measure the plan,” Flood says. “We have a formal process each year where we re-evaluate the strategic plan. It’s not necessarily a ground-up reinventing of ourselves, but we do spend a significant amount of time on it and then roll it out. That’s the point where execution comes in.”
