My name is Ron Lamb. I’m a Canadian living the the San Francisco Bay area. My business energy has shifted from all of the roles that I’ve had over the past 30 years. My focus is on how organizations can make a significant improvement in execution of strategy. There is opportunity for organizations to bring increased structure and meaning to all their targets, resources and efforts so that expectations are met. They seem at times to be manageable and at other times inexplicably out of sync and failing. I am focused on those new options that help organizations move from Hope to Certainty in execution of strategy.
Over the past years I’ve also become much more interested in including the impact of the often inexplicable ways that as individuals we can get in the way of success, perhaps without even realizing it.
It seems that for all my work, and the work of my colleagues, execution fails far too often. Oh, I have a wonderful resume as I’m sure you do. It is full of my successes. How is it possible then that study after study shows that 45- 75% of strategic programs fail to meet expectations? Am I the only one who is successful? Do 45 -75% of my colleagues claim to have only had 25 to 65% success in their careers?
It is time to acknowledge that something is drastically wrong with execution. Current organizational execution capabilities are falling way short when it comes to transformational or not ‘business as usual’ execution.
I have studied the problem for many years and have come up with a methodology that is designed to do more than add just incremental improvement to existing execution approaches. With failure figures this high, fresh approaches have been needed. To that end I’ve developed a methodology called the Language of Execution™ supported by a set of tools to be used when execution complexity is high.
I started by testing my theories out with former clients and colleagues. As I tested out my theory, I asked them for honest feedback. My work would only be useful, if it was;
- understandable
- pragmatic
- not an incremental improvement to some other solution
- simple to implement
- would provide a significant increase in certainty of success.
I’ve also presented the material as a guest lecturer at the University of San Francisco’s Executive MBA program, the Annual Conference for the Association for Strategic Planning and at a conference for International Airline and Airport Executives.
I hope you’ll enjoy following along with me in this blog as I share my experience and elements of the methodology and tools. I look forward to hearing your experiences, theories, questions, challenges and helpful critique.
On a personal note, I’ve got three children, a Dutch wife and a dog. Having worked or lived in over 45 countries many of our family members and friends are internationally based. I plan to regularly provide interesting and funny stories of my global execution experiences to keep the blog a fun place to visit. There is no place or group on earth that has cornered the market in successful execution.
I graduated in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada, but spent my first year in Chemical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and Holy Cross Jr. College at South Bend Indiana.
My life is filled with kid related events in scouting, volleyball, archery, rugby, and whatever season’s sport it is. I enjoy playing the guitar and I’m an amateur magician and member of the Society of American Magicians.
I guess you could say that with my challenge to find ways to significantly improve an organization’s successful execution of strategy, that I’m really trying to pull a rabbit out of the hat!