Success in any business depends upon the organization's ability to think and act strategically, and to execute its plans and programs with speed and agility. Creating a brilliant, market-savvy strategy, no small task to be sure, is much easier than executing it successfully. Payers often approach strategy execution as a "top-down" process, where the senior executive team articulates a strategy and business objectives, then creates process flows, performance metrics and communications programs to tell employees what they need to do and enforce their compliance with prescribed practices. In this approach, employees rarely contribute to process design or clearly understand why their roles and responsibilities need to change.
A "bottom-up" approach can be equally problematic. Here, the theory is that the employees on the front lines — those who actually handle interactions with customers or process claims — know best how to do their jobs, and that executives too often stifle their employees' innovative and entrepreneurial energies.
Any competitive business needs to strike a practical balance between strategic fiat and strategic anarchy. Solid strategies, processes, and technologies create the foundation for competitiveness, but the organization's people must understand and adopt programs and initiatives to compete successfully. Managing change and managing programs thus complement each other, together creating and sustaining a business' competitive advantage.
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