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- Strategy implementation: what is the failure rate?Publication . Cândido, Carlos; Santos, Sérgio Pereira dosStrategy implementation has attracted the interest of researchers from the strategic management field almost since its foundation and has been the subject of much debate, in part, due to the ‘high’ percentage of organisational strategies that fail. It is often claimed that 50 to 90 percent of strategic initiatives fail to succeed. These claims have often been used to propose new management tools and to dismiss others. As we intend to show, although these claims have had a significant impact in management practice and theory, they are, however, controversial. In this paper we aim to clarify why this is the case and to emphasise that any attempts to produce a generic estimate of the rate of failure based on the current state of affairs are of little practical value. To this purpose an extensive review of the literature is presented and discussed. Based on the analysis of this literature, we conclude that whilst it is widely acknowledged that the implementation of a new strategy can be a difficult task, nobody seems to really know what the true rate of implementation failure is. Much of this uncertainty is due to the fact that some of the estimates presented in the literature are based on evidence that is eitheroutdated, fragmentary, fragile, or just absent. Careful consideration is therefore advised before using these estimates to promote changes in the theory and/or practice of strategic management.
- Is TQM more difficult to implement than other transformational strategies?Publication . Cândido, Carlos; Santos, Sérgio Pereira dosThis paper aims to assess whether Total Quality Management (TQM) is harder to implement than other business strategies. In order to accomplish this objective we have adopted a two-stage methodology. Firstly, we carried out an extensive review of the literature to identify the rates of TQM implementation failure estimated by researchers and practitioners. Secondly, we compared these rates with those estimated for other organisation-wide transformational efforts and explored the extent to which the obstacles to TQM implementation and to the implementation of other business strategies differ. Based on the literature reviewed and on the comparative analyses performed, we conclude that while it is widely acknowledged that the implementation of TQM can be a difficult task, significant uncertainty remains as to what the exact rate of failure is. Furthermore, the analyses suggest that the rates of failure and obstacles to TQM implementation are similar to those presented by other business strategies, and therefore, there seems to be no grounds to assume that TQM is more difficult to implement than other business strategies. These findings have implications for researchers and practitioners and open up several avenues for further research, which are also discussed in this paper.
- Obstacles, their relationships and strategy implementation failurePublication . Cândido, Carlos; Santos, Sérgio Pereira dosStrategy implementation remains a difficult task with improbable success. This paper provides an explanation on why so many strategy implementation efforts fail. The paper addresses the following questions: What are the obstacles to a successful strategy implementation? Do these obstacles simply accumulate during implementation or do they relate to each other in more damaging ways? and Can an obstacle be the cause leading to, and reinforcing, other obstacles? Based on an extensive review of the literature and on an in-depth case study analysis, this paper draws three main conclusions. The first is that there is little agreement regarding what the real implementation obstacles are. The second is that obstacles interact and can be strongly interrelated in dynamic and complex manners, which add further difficulties to the process of strategy implementation. The third is that obstacles can lead to and cause other obstacles, eventually forming long causality chains of blockages.
- Strategy implementation: what is the failure rate?Publication . Cândido, Carlos; Santos, Sérgio Pereira dosIt is often claimed that 50–90% of strategic initiatives fail. Although these claims have had a significant impact on management theory and practice, they are controversial. We aim to clarify why this is the case. Towards this end, an extensive review of the literature is presented, assessed, compared and discussed. We conclude that while it is widely acknowledged that the implementation of a new strategy can be a difficult task, the true rate of implementation failure remains to be determined. Most of the estimates presented in the literature are based on evidence that is outdated, fragmentary, fragile or just absent. Careful consideration is advised before using current estimates to justify changes in the theory and practice. A set of guiding principles is presented for assisting researchers to produce better estimates of the rates of failure.