A consistent observation of firms and organizations is a tendency to invest heavily in organizational-level capabilities and resources. Programs around functional leadership development, operational efficiency and process consistency have senior leader sponsors, standing budgets and metrics written into compensation plans. There is always one nagging question: are those investments connected to performance? Like an athlete […]
I’ve been talking with a number of product and services leaders in North America about the state of their recovery from the COVID period and I’m hearing several persistent themes. One that stands out? The sheer workload and deep fatigue they are experiencing. It really feels for all the world that you are doing the […]
Has this ever happened to you? As I was cleaning out my office the other day, I came across a report from a strategy offsite during my days as a Fortune 500 exec. If your firm is anything like the one I was part of, this may sound familiar…. We paid big money to have […]
When I do workshops for firms on how to accelerate strategic implementation, rarely does a session go by where the shortage of key talent does not come up. This has always been an issue when a firm has a strategic challenge to rise to a new level. But I am finding that as we work […]
We’ve never had a time quite like this – explosive demands for goods and services, really mobile talent and the wholesale reorganization of work itself. At the same time, many leaders are feeling like they are on a treadmill – through no fault of their own – and noticing that the harder they run, the […]
It was a great offsite session. The core business was profitable, but growth prospects had dimmed. In corporate life, if you don’t hit your year-over-year growth numbers, the team’s momentum and compensation package is significantly reduced. With that in mind, we had worked hard on which of the four growth plays we had researched would […]
The lockdown has been particularly hard on strategists. They have been receiving much of their information secondhand: reading articles, catching Zoom calls with the sales team and attending virtual events. All while trying hard to listen for the unspoken story behind logical data. But it turns out that secondhand clues are no substitute for first-person […]
I was speaking with a strategy VP in an international firm who was getting ready to deliver a presentation for the executive team that showed a surprising under performance of projects to the business case benchmarks they had set. Just for the record, this is a high-quality team with sound leadership, strong values and a […]
Rolling up our sleeves only goes so far. There has been an inflection point in the discussion where leaders realize that they simply cannot do it all. Virtual work has pushed us into a corner in two ways: first collaborative work is less efficient. Secondly, more time in the home office has led to more […]
It’s one of the most frequent questions I get in my work – and it usually comes from a leader after a workshop or in a discrete reply to a blog post. The question is, “I have an underperforming function that’s core to my new mission. How do I accomplish a change for the better?” […]
