🖨️ Add Transformation For Instant Gravitas 🎩 - Transformation Buzzword
There's an unwritten law of corporate budgeting that everyone has used and nobody has ever admitted to. If you want an idea taken seriously, add the word Transformation to it (Transformation Buzzword).
Nobody funds a printer upgrade. Everybody funds an "Office Transformation Initiative".
The employee at the whiteboard learned the trick the same way the rest of us did, by watching Agile Transformation, Digital Transformation, and Business Transformation sail through approval. The executives across the table learned something too, which is exactly how many times a person can hear that word before their eyes roll on their own. Somewhere along the way, Transformation stopped describing a change and started selling one. It became the word you attach to almost anything when you need it to sound important.
The irony is that Agile, Digital, and Business transformation are not fake. Each one is a genuine component of bridging the gap between strategy and execution. The problem is they usually get pitched, funded, and run as separate programs, each with its own label, budget, and champions, instead of as connected parts of one capability.
Maybe it's time to stop adding the word and start building the capability!
That is the heart of Principle 2 of the 10 Key Principles of Strategy Execution, Establish an Enterprise Function to Orchestrate Strategy Execution. Treat Strategy Execution as a critical capability, and develop an operating system that integrates Strategic Portfolio Management, Architecture and Op Model Design, Project Execution, and Change Management, so every initiative is judged on its value case and its alignment with strategy, not on how impressive its name sounds.
The 10 Key Principles aren't something we came up with on our own. They're being defined in the open by the StrategyXF community, multi-disciplinary leaders and practitioners across Strategy, Operations, Finance, HR, Architecture, Transformation, PMO, Delivery, and Change Management, naming the real challenges holding organizations back and sharing whats actually worked.
Which "Transformation" has your organization funded, and what was the project actually called before it got the upgrade?👇Â
StrategyXF Painfully Accurate Series (Sad, but True!)
This cartoon is part of Painfully Accurate, a StrategyXF series built from real Strategy Execution challenges our members have actually lived through, laughed about, and found a way past.
Every scene started as something a leader or practitioner described, not a hypothetical, an actual moment somebody in this community said out loud and everyone else in the room recognized instantly. Sad but true, every one of them, and every one of them survivable.
If any of this feels a little too familiar, you're exactly who this community was built for. Join StrategyXF and help us turn these shared war stories into the practical, personalized strategies that finally put them behind us.
