7S Framework

It's all very well devising a strategy, but you have to be able to implement it if it's to do any good. The Seven S Framework first appeared in 'The Art Of Japanese Management' by Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos in 1981. They had been looking at how Japanese industry had been so successful, at around the same time that Tom Peters and Robert Waterman were exploring what made a company excellent. The Seven S model was born at a meeting of the four authors in 1978. It went on to appear in 'In Search of Excellence' by Peters and Waterman, and was taken up as a basic tool by the global management consultancy McKinsey: it's sometimes known as the McKinsey 7S model.

Managers, they said, need to take account of all seven of the factors to be sure of successful implementation of a strategy - large or small. They're all interdependent, so if you fail to pay proper attention to one of them, it can bring the others crashing down around you. Oh, and the relative importance of each factor will vary over time, and you can't always tell how that's changing. Like a lot of these models, there's a good dose of common sense in here, but the 7S Framework is useful way of checking that you've covered all the bases.

The 7S's