Since the appearance of COVID, I’ve had opportunities to work with executives on key organizational change questions, all of which have been driven by the goal of making their organizations leaner, more responsive, and resilient for what lies ahead. In some cases, they are working to create stronger horizontal engagement along lines of value for […]
We’ve just completed four months of the brutal new normal. I’ve been speaking with dozens of leaders who have been doing the hard work of finding a path forward where almost every pre-COVID pattern has been changed. The sheer amount of disruption to our patterns has been staggering, for instance where we work, how we […]
It has been an amazing and humbling week, working closely with business leaders as they lead their teams through this extraordinary disruption. I have been privileged to share the 4-Step Framework with them and talk specifically about which phase of recovery they are in and which leadership skills are most important during each of the […]
In the two months since the pandemic turned life as we know it on its head, there’s one truth that’s becoming increasingly clear with each passing week: Not even the best firms can take out their pre-pandemic strategic playbook and apply it to their organization successfully Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a number of […]
Apocryphal story – The CFO and the Strategist are looking at a block of marble. The CEO has asked for a 20 percent reduction in the volume of the block. The CFO draws a line, pulls out a massive saw and gets ready to make one cut to achieve the goal. The strategist, on the […]
I hinted at something in this article: that there were a large number of leaders who have not had the experience of leading through an economic downturn since they became senior leaders. Since penning that note, I have spoken with several leaders who are in this demographic who have had some really powerful on-the-ground observations. […]
With little warning, the current pandemic has thrust many of us into the world of virtual work with almost no time to adjust. The outcome is that we’ve taken the processes we used in our face-to-face lives and directly mapped them to our dens and bedrooms. I’ve been on the phone and in the messenger […]
As this article is being written, we are heading into a major public health disruption around the COVID-19 virus. At this point, leaders around the globe are working out their responses, and it is very clear that there will not be a business on the planet that does not have clients that will feel the […]
It seemingly comes from nowhere and is one of the most frequent symptoms that lead to firms reaching out for help. The call usually goes something like this: “We have a leader who has served extraordinarily well in [insert previous significant role]. We recently gave them responsibility in this new area, and it’s not going […]
We were 24 months into a very difficult business unit turnaround and a lot of the hardest decisions were behind us. We had “right-sized” the group so that it was supportable by the existing business run rate. We had reviewed the customer base and focused on the subset where we could provide the most value. […]
