Estimated reading time: 10-12 minutes
Executing Business Strategy
Clear objectives are critical for business success. A defined objective, scope, and advantage determine whether you fail or success. Without a process that establishes a well-executed business strategy, you risk becoming a statistic.
Strategy mapping is a way to describe, implement, and manage business strategy. The strategy map tells the story of your strategy and presents a prescription for action. It communicates the strategy to the organization and provides a direct line of sight from everyone’s activities to the desired results. The measurement is the language that gives clarity to vague concepts.
Feedback from the measures tests the hypothesis of the strategy. This changes the nature of the conversation in your meetings and connects the strategy to the work of the organization.
What makes strategy mapping powerful is that it requires four perspectives for strategy development that cover the scopes of responsibilities of your entire leadership:

Thus, everyone has a stake in the strategy, as well as a set of requirements they must meet.
The Four Perspectives
The strategy unification roadmap framework identifies the factors that create long-term economic value in an organization.

Traditional financial reports look backward. They reflect only on the past—spending incurred and revenue earned. Instead, measure the creation and destruction of future economic value.
The customer perspective focuses on satisfying, retaining, and acquiring customers in targeted segments.
The internal business processes deliver the value proposition to targeted customers:
- Innovative products and services
- High quality, flexible, and responsive operating processes
- Excellent post-sales support
The organizational learning and growth perspective focuses on developing skilled, motivated employees; providing access to strategic information; and aligning individuals and teams to business unit objectives.
The components of these four perspectives—with the critical-to-quality (CTQ) flow-down and the capability flow-up—make up the strategy map.

The Strategy Unification Roadmap™ Unifies Resource Action Planning
The strategy unification roadmap is a framework to execute business strategy. Beginning with a disciplined and consistent way to describe the business strategy, its measures are the key. They are what the organization hears. Feedback tests the logic of the strategy and guides adjustments. It is a transparent visualization in plain view of and with the ongoing collaboration of the organization.
The flow-down arrows illustrate how the strategy is built. For example, the customer perspective must address and validate the financial expectations; the internal processes must address customer expectations necessary to meet objectives. The learning perspective should be driven by both the customer perspective and the operational perspective.
The strategy unification roadmap describes and communicates how a particular business unit or market segment is going to create value.
It is a detailed and comprehensive template or checklist to frame your strategy and describes what you are going to do in a logical framework. A complete description requires written strategic objectives so everyone in the business unit or market segment knows what they are going to do.
The logic of the framework answers the question “How?” (the strategy achieves the financial goals) as you go down and the question “Why?” (the internal work is critical to meet the value promise to customers and thus achieve the financial goals) as you go up.

The time spent aligning the management team on the strategy is worth gold. All the rest flows down much more easily.

The graphic above is a more detailed strategy unification roadmap. The logic of the strategy map shows where critical to quality (CTQ) and critical to customer (CTC) details fit.
In this example, internal best practices were developed to increase capabilities to more effectively achieve superior performance in key areas in each sub-map. Together, the details of each element of the flow-down tell the story of a complete framework that drives actions.
When coming up with your strategy unification roadmap, there are three key questions you need to ask yourself:
What does your customer value?
How are you going to create and capture value?
How will you know how you’re doing?
Without understanding, you can’t implement. Without measurement, you can’t manage. And without clear description, you can’t measure.
The Strategy Unification Roadmap in Practice
Below is a strategy map we devised for a client. Their goal was to grow revenue to this sector to $55 million by the end-of-the-time horizon they selected. The map presents the four perspectives—financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth—customized to reflect the specifics of the client’s organization.

focuses on the revenue growth strategy and the productivity strategy
focuses on growth, innovation, core, transactional, and outsourcing.
focuses on application markets, growth and innovation management, operations/supply chain, and people.
focuses on competency, communication, training, the climate for action, and leadership.
Final Thoughts
A Strategic Unification management system based on a strategy map is the best way to align strategy and tactics across the organization from business leadership to functional teams and individuals. Everyone can use the tool to drive on the road of their unit’s performance and metrics.
Strategy maps enable managers to define and communicate the cause-and-effect relationships that deliver their unit’s contribution to the customer value proposition. It is a powerful scorecard for implementing and monitoring the unit’s strategy. Therefore, a strategy map provides both a template and a common language for assembling and communicating information about value creation.
About the Authors

Pamela Roach
is CEO of Breakthrough Marketing Technology. She is dedicated to our mission of enabling businesses to make decisions based on fact. She has designed, collected, analyzed, and delivered the intelligence necessary to produce insights into the motivations, attitudes, and outcomes that characterize multicultural targets. In addition to her work at Breakthrough, she also teaches graduate students Integrated Marketing and Media Campaigns and NYU School for Professional Studies.

Ron Sullivan
is a Senior Partner at Breakthrough Marketing Technology. He has worked with many businesses on innovation, new product development processes, strategy, building new business models, channels, and distribution, and pricing optimization. He has significant expertise in study design, data analysis, and market intelligence.