Rebel without a cause

I recently kicked off a series of posts on insulation that’s meant to talk about the critical ways leaders can become disconnected—and hopefully provide some ideas on how they can fight against it.

I listed four kinds of insulation in the introductory post:

• From the larger organizational context
• From the work being done on the ground
• From wider communities of practice
• From the marketplace

In this post I want to dig into the first, insulation from the larger organizational context.

Insulation

I get to meet a lot of leaders in my day-to-day work, from C-level executives to line-level managers and everything in between. And I get to see them at their best–fresh off the victory of getting X million dollars for establishing an enterprise content management (ECM) program–and their worst–in the middle of a mess they can’t fix, with their jobs (or maybe even their careers) on the line.

There are lots of interesting things to note about leaders in both of these positions, but the one that’s been on my mind lately is the importance of struggling against insulation:

• From the larger organizational context
• From the work being done on the ground
• From the wider community of practice for a domain of expertise
• From the wider marketplace

I want to kick off a series of posts over the next few weeks that look at this problem and how leaders at all levels can overcome it. As I let the ideas percolate, I’d love to hear from folks out there who’ve faced this issue themselves, or worked with a leader who did–what are your thoughts and experiences out there? Jump in, and let’s get the conversation started!

Review of Redefining Health Care, by Porter and Teisberg

Looking back through my records, it appears that I began Porter and Tesiberg’s Redefining Health Care last November, so it’s a bit embarrassing that I’ve only now, in March, managed to finish it. In my defense, about halfway through it, I left it on a plane, and that initiated a bit of an odyssey to get it back, but really it’s just a long book and I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked with other books over the last two months. But enough excuses…

Do we really need a Chief Strategy Officer?

After taking a break last post to review Open Leadership, by Charlene Li, I want to return to corporate strategy.

For those of you keeping score, I spent a few posts walking through a hands-on approach to building out strategy that I’ve used successfully at many clients.

Today, however, I want to step back a bit and get a little philosophical by considering whether strategy is something organizations should address through a dedicated department that rolls up to a Chief Strategy Officer.

Spoiler alert: I don’t have a definitive answer. So if you’re looking for one, you need to go somewhere else. But I have some thoughts on the matter that I want to explore a bit here.

Review of Open Leadership, by Charlene Li

Just finished Open Leadership, by Charlene Li, which is a follow-up to her best-selling Groundswell. And whereas that book focused on the social media technologies that are transforming how companies do business, Open Leadership looks at how leaders need to transform themselves to allow their organizations to use social media effectively.

There’s a real glut of books out there on social media, and I find many of them lack real substance or staying power, whether because the social media domain is evolving so quickly or the books have been rushed to market (or both). Li’s book, in contrast, has a good bit of depth and will have quite a bit of staying power despite its timeliness.

Alignment (part three)

I’m in the middle of a series of posts focused on corporate strategy that are going to be part theory and part practice, a way to mine the work I’ve been doing over the last couple of years for insights. Hopefully folks out there will find them not only valuable, but good conversation starters for sharing their own thoughts and experiences.

In the last post, I began demonstrating an exercise that can help turn a laundry list of aspirations into a prioritized (and actionable) set of goals. We got as far as determining the Top Two goals that the strategy would support and then using the remaining items on the laundry list to formulate guiding principles.

In this post, I want to take the exercise further to show how to connect your guiding principles to the capabilities and projects needed to deliver them.

Alignment (part two)

I’m in the middle of a series of posts focused on corporate strategy that are going to be part theory and part practice, a way to mine the work I’ve been doing over the last couple of years for insights. Hopefully folks out there will find them not only valuable, but good conversation starters for sharing their own thoughts and experiences.

In the last post, I introduced the idea that to be effective, strategy needs to be aligned with larger goals and began walking through an alignment exercise I’ve found useful. We’d reached the point where we had a laundry list of possible goals and realized that if we tried to do everything on the list, we would likely fail–a list of this many goals is just too diverse to be actionable, especially when the organization needs to make tough decisions about tradeoffs.

Let’s continue walking through the exercise to see how you turn a laundry list into a clear call to action.

Alignment

Last week, I kicked off a series of posts focused on corporate strategy. I want to make these part theory and part practice, a way to mine the work I’ve been doing over the last couple of years for insights—hopefully folks out there will find them not only valuable, but good conversation starters for sharing their own thoughts and experiences.

In the last post, I shared my thoughts on why strategy is important:

I think strategy often gets a bad rap as a means of procrastinating, a form of analysis-paralysis, or, at the very least, a non-value-adding exercise: We don’t have time for strategy—we need to get something done.

But I would argue that getting the wrong thing done is worse than doing nothing at all. And without strategic planning, you have a lower probability not only of doing the right thing, but of doing it well.

What’s implied in these statements is that doing strategic planning poorly is worse than not doing strategic planning at all. And so with that, let’s take a look at one technique I’ve used successfully for doing it well.

The way you do the things you do

Out of all the things we could do at any given time, which of them should we do?

It’s a difficult question, and one that leaders face on a regular basis. There’s a long list of things they can do, want to do, plan to do, have been told do to, or are smack in the middle of doing. But without strategy it’s more difficult to be sure why they might do one over the other, more difficult to articulate clearly and convincingly why they did this thing and not that.

Strategy done right:

• Creates the conditions required to effect a tight integration between planning and execution
• Allows you to take a laundry list of goals, aims, and aspirations and prioritize them so that you know which of them should take precedence when tough decisions need to be made
• Aligns higher order activities like setting priorities and guiding principles with more tactically focused ones like building capabilities and executing against them

I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with 50+ organizations over the last few years as a strategic consultant. It’s given me the chance to watch first-hand how organizations and their leaders struggle to create strategies and execute effectively against them…and to partner with many of them in doing so.

I think strategy often gets a bad rap as a means of procrastinating, a form of analysis-paralysis, or, at the very least, a non-value-adding exercise: We don’t have time for strategy—we need to get something done.

But I would argue that getting the wrong thing done is worse than doing nothing at all. And without strategic planning, you have a lower probability not only of doing the right thing, but of doing it well.

In that spirit, I want to kick off a series of posts focused on corporate strategy: part theory, part practice, I plan to dig in to the work I’ve been doing over the last couple of years and mine it for the insights I find the most valuable—and hopefully folks out there will find them not only valuable, but good conversation starters for sharing their own thoughts and experiences.

As I get to work planning the next post, jump in now and give us your suggestions for posts, or even your thoughts, insights, etc. about strategy…it would be a great way to kick-start the conversation.

Not technology, but management

I took a longer break than expected from my reading over the holidays, so I’m only about halfway done with Porter and Teisberg’s Redefining Health Care. But despite that, I’m still finding lots of thought-provoking passages as I make my way slowly through their work.

I came across this one right before the holidays and have been meaning to write about it ever since: “We have come to believe strongly that technology is important, but that the major problem the [health care] system is facing today is not technology but management” (p. 100).

In my experience, this is an all-too-common problem at the organizations I work with inside and outside health care. Almost daily I bump up against leaders who are willing to absent themselves from the fundamentals of management in the hopes that a new technology will solve business problems.