Missing in action
It’s 4:30am Saturday. Raining. I should be asleep. Perhaps if I could focus on the rain. But as I’m lying there, in my mind I’m drafting a note to the bank. My story has been told before, but I wanted to share my experience.
Starbucks and the US$100M hire?
In August 2024 Starbucks removed its then CEO, Narasimhan, and appointed a ‘rock star’ CEO & Chair, Brian Niccol, with a hiring package worth more than US$100M. SBX shares immediately jumped almost 25% adding ca. US$25B to their market value.
The Board/Executive strategy workshop - a practise note
Henry Mintzberg wrote 25 years ago: we need better practice, not neater theories. Amen to that. Much of the writing on the ‘formal strategy process’ ignore the practical reality that strategies have a life cycle.
Smartest guys in the room… what could go wrong?
Commonwealth Bank (‘Which bank?’) is just the most recent example of overconfidence in the ‘intellectual capacity’ of a leadership team to steer the organisation through the ‘white water’ of modern corporate life.
MBAs, strategy and judgement
The objective of an MBA strategy program is to expose leaders of the future to various theories, frameworks and concepts of strategy. But the reality is that many of strategy’s concepts are not necessarily settled.
I feel the need, the need for speed...
When we think about decision-making, we probably think first about decision quality: getting decisions right. And why not? Rio Tinto would prefer it made a better decision when it spent $39B on the Alcan acquisition (since written off ca. $33B).
MBA reflections... what stuck?
In parallel with my consulting/advisory practice, I just finished teaching business strategy – the traditional capstone unit – to 47 MBA students. What stuck across that 12-week period? One way of judging that is through the students’ learning journals.
Woolworths and the normalisation of deviance
Twenty years ago, Dianne Vaughan coined the term ‘normalisation of deviance to explain the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. It describes how seemingly small choices, made in the context of daily decisions repeated over time, “can camouflage a cumulative directionality that too often is discernible only in hindsight”.
Are we really that bad at strategy execution? Mostly yes...
Last night I was teaching strategy execution on the MBA capstone unit. I asked the participants: ‘In your experience, how well did the companies you know rate on strategy execution on a scale of 1-10? Only one rated some of the companies he’d worked with above 5.
Strategy, execution and dog food...
As I write this, I am a participant in our strategic planning forum with a mix of old and new ‘friends’. Having written so much on strategy execution, it seems now I have to eat my own dog food. I
What's your plan to overcome the strategy-execution deficit?
The first step in solving any problem is to recognise there is one. Reed Hastings, the founder/CEO of Netflix, recently commented that Netflix was enjoying a period of stability; that now it knew exactly where it was going: ‘our challenges are execution challenges’.
Bridging the Strategy-Execution Air Gap
My previous blog highlighted the opportunity for dramatically improved strategy execution if organisations get the socio-cultural elements right. But only if the 'structural' elements of execution are in place. The reaction of one reader highlights the challenge:
Can someone help me please? I'm stuck!
At a recent workshop on strategy execution, one of the executives said she felt ‘stuck’ as she thought about how to translate their strategy into outcomes. That’s unsurprising. Research consistently shows organisations massively under-perform on strategy execution.
Rethinking leadership development - it's about strategy execution
About 15 years ago, a major Australian resources company set out to develop ‘world-class leadership’. But Professor Chris Worley rebuts the usual prescription of ‘more leadership’. He argues that asking people to change behaviours without changing the underlying system – the structure, systems and processes – is borderline immoral.
Strategy lessons from the greatest CEO in tech history… and it's not Jobs
The recent death of Andy Grove passed unremarked in the Australian press. Grove has been called the greatest CEO in tech history: he mentored a young Steve Jobs. A former Intel CEO, Grove was responsible for the transformation of Intel from a ‘memory company’ to a ‘microprocessor company’.
The profound responsibility of leadership
The most creative conversations of our professional lives engage both our emotional and analytic selves. These conversations are the source of inspiration and sense-making that leave you buzzing hours later; that wake you in the middle of the night; that create new insights through connecting previously disconnected ideas.
Leadership lessons from the world of Australian politics
Leadership and strategy are inextricably linked. One without the other is like fertiliser without water: wasted. The reader could be forgiven for raising a quizzical eye at the suggestion there is anything to learn about leadership from recent years of Australian politics.
Leadership lessons from Dockers' coach Ross Lyons
In the early 90s, Paul Keating remarked that every parrot in the pet shop was squawking micro-economic reform. Today those same parrots would be squawking productivity. While this is a multi-dimensional challenge, leadership plays a fundamental role.
Stronger no longer - what now?
One of my resource clients recently shared his observations after returning from a marketing conference and from a series of meetings with many of his customers. The message was loud and clear: the ‘stronger for longer’ mantra of the resources sector is now ‘stronger no longer’.
GE, the CEO and Strategy
Jeff Immelt, CEO, and GE present a fascinating study on the influence of the CEO vis-à-vis the influence of the environmental context in which they operate, and the pervasive influence of a global corporation’s core competency on strategy.