Every year, we gather our thoughts and consider resolutions for the coming year.

In our personal lives resolutions may include losing weight, seeing new sights and increasing our retirement savings. In business, resolutions often relate to trimming the fat, expanding into new markets, increasing profit margins and launching new products and services.

No matter the goal, it requires us to formulate a strategy that helps us to achieve our desired results. And here lies the problem. Formulating strategy is one thing. Executing it is another.

The simple truth is most of us are trained to plan, not to execute. Execution is all too often learned in the "school of hard knocks." And, like it or not, our pathways to successful results are likely to be loaded with unforeseen mistakes and frustrations.

For any business caring about its brand's promise, becoming better versed in the ways of plan execution is a must. In fact, place it high on this coming New Year's resolution list. Do so and you gain a tremendous competitive advantage over your competitors who continue to ignore its importance.

A mistake made by many owners and managers is to view their role as strictly being an innovator of challenging work (i.e. planning) and then handing the ball off to their subordinates for final execution. If things go wrong, the problem is then placed squarely at the feet of the "doer." But what good is this? The damage is done.

Poor execution methods are highly problematic. This often results in employees not understanding how their job contributes to important outcomes. Time and money are wasted because of inefficiency. Decisions often take too long to make and the business reacts slowly or inappropriately to competitive pressures. Any one of these may cause companywide frustration and cost your business dearly.

When developing your New Year's resolutions begin by establishing a strategy execution model as goal No. 1. Do so and you will have taken an important first step in making your upcoming planned strategies work as needed.

How you execute your planned strategies is a key to strategy success. Clarify each and every step of an execution plan with your employees.

As you examine your current approach to implementing your plans, you will discover much of the difficulty of execution is due to the obstacles or impediments to it. These may include the requisite time frames needed for execution; involvement of various people in the process; poorly defined or vague strategy; conflicts in the organization or unclear responsibility and accountability.

Getting these under control from the beginning will go a long way in establishing a well-planned execution process.

Having a model or a set of guidelines for outlining the entire plan-execution process will go a long way in making this a well-planned year.

- Kenneth Dodd is a marketing consultant and a regular columnist for The Californian.