Strategy gap

A strategy gap refers to the gap between the gap between the current performance of an organisation and its desired performance as expressed in its mission, objectives, goals and the strategy for achieving them.

Often unseen, the gap is a threat to the future performance—and even survival—of an organization and is guaranteed to impact the efficiency and effectiveness of senior executives and their management team. It is considered to be real and exists within most organizations. A often quoted article in the Fortune magazine in June 1999 found that 70% of CEO failures were the result of poor execution than poor strategies.

There are various schools of thought on what causes the gap between vision and execution and how the the strategy gap is to be avoided. In 2005, [[Paul R. Niven][2]] pinpointed four sources for the gap between strategy and execution, namely lack of vision, people, management and resources. He argued that few understand the organisation's strategy and as most people's pay is linked to short-term financial results, maximising short-term gains leads to less rational decision making. Management is spending little attention to the linkage between financial plan and strategy and unless the strategic initiatives are properly funded and resourced, their failure is virtually assured.

In the book “The Strategy Gap: Leveraging Technology to Execute Winning” (2003), the authors argue that the main causes of the strategy gap could be grouped into three areas, each of which interacts with the others. These three areas are: The way managements acts to implement strategic initiatives (management induced gaps), traditional processes (example budgeting, forecasting, reporting) used to implement strategy (process induced gaps) and, technology systems used to support those processes (technology induced gaps).