Factors influencing strategy implementation at Kenya commercial bank limited in Kenya

Strategy has its historical roots in military activities from the early times of Chinese \ngeneral and strategist Sun Tzu, through to the Italian philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli. \nOrganizations initiate strategies to survive and achieve competitive advantage. Strategy \nimplementation is how a firm creates the organizational arrangement that allows it to \npursue its strategy most effectively in order to create sustainable competitive advantage. \nIt is the manner an organization develops, utilizes and amalgamates organizational \nstructure, control systems and culture to follow strategies that lead to competitive \nadvantage and better performance. The strategy implementation process involves \napplication of management process to obtain desired results by designing organization \nstructure, allocation of resources, utilizing information for quality decision-making and \neffective management of human resources. This study had two objectives namely to \nestablish the factors influencing strategy implementation at Kenya Commercial Bank \nLimited and secondly, to determine the influence of such factors on strategy \nimplementation at Kenya Commercial Bank Limited. The case study on KCB Group \nfound out that a number of factors that affect strategy implementation such as leadership, \ncommunication, resources, budgets, staff, systems, structure and culture were very critical \nfor implementation by guiding and transforming the shared values to be aligned with the \nstrategic objectives. Top management is the critical guiding element in facilitating \nstrategy implementation at KCB Group. Leadership is key to implementation success \nsince it is more heavily involved in strategy formulation and control processes. \nLeadership is delegated to middle and lower level management to afford delegation and \nownership of the implementation process. The bank favours top-down strategy \nimplementation and control so as to guide the implementation process in line with the \nstrategic objectives and the organization’s values and vision.