Patty Azzarello - Move: How Decisive Leaders Execute Strategy Despite Obstacles, Setbacks, & Stalls

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Azzarello, Patty, author.

Title: Move : how decisive leaders execute strategy despite obstacles, setbacks, and stalls / Patty Azzarello.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2017] | Includes index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016044306 | ISBN 9781119348375 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119348368 (epub) | ISBN 9781119348405 (ePDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Strategic planning. | Organizational behavior. | Leadership.

Classification: LCC HD30.28 .A994 2017 | DDC 658.4/092dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016044306

To Al and Jim

(In order of appearance)

A while back I was asked to participate in one of those executive leadership programs where you go off-site with your peers and role-play a business simulation over the course of a couple of days.

You found yourself in charge of a fictional business, needing to make smart decisions, trade-offs, and investments to grow your revenue and profits in competition with your peers and their pretend businesses.

One of the tools you had in this simulation was the ability to make investments in various predefined initiatives. These initiatives were things like manager training, supply chain cost reduction, or accelerating product development.

Investing in an initiative would result in an advantage, like extra profit from cost reductions or shorter time to market. You couldn't just apply these initiatives. Just like in the real world, if you wanted to invest in an initiative, you needed to find the money to fund it from somewhere else in the business. You could either make a short-term profit trade-off, or take investment from another part of the operation to fund the initiative.

But unlike the real world, all you needed to do was to choose an initiative and fund itand then your business gained the advantage in the simulation. You simply wrote the check and collected the benefit. Just like that. Every time.

One of the most senior executives joked, The great thing about these initiatives is that they actually work! In our world, we just spend the money on the initiative, and then it doesn't help. I wish our initiatives worked this well.

Everyone laughed.

Isn't that awful? That we can all so easily relate to spending money on strategic initiatives that don't work? Why do we keep doing this?

At the heart of every execution problem is the fact that there are not enough people doing what the business needs to move forward.

Whether we are talking about transformation, specific strategic initiatives, or overall business strategy, I frequently observe that execution stalls because of some particular, common, and chronic challengessystemic issues that occur in all organizations, which leaders often just accept as an unchangeable part of the environment.

One of the challenges is being too busy. You can't get to be a $1B organization if you are too busy being a $200M organization. When short-term pressures regularly take priority over doing more strategic stuff, you end up burning all your time and resources reacting to issues and opportunities in an ad hoc manner, instead of making progress on the strategic work that will enable you to scale. New initiatives require new work. People (at all levels) are just too busy and distracted to get traction on or even start doing the new thing. It's not that your strategy is wrong or the initiative wouldn't help; it's that it doesn't get done because no one has time to do it.

If you talk to the executives, they often cite frustration with mid-level managers and directors who are not strategic enough, because they do not personally make the decisions and trade-offs necessary to actually get the new work done at their level and below. They keep waiting for direction from above.

If you talk to the mid-level managers, they often cite that execs fail to provide enough claritythere are persistent debates and unanswered questions that keep people waiting vs. doing. Also, lack of clarity causes an automatic lack of alignment that results in skepticism, weak support, or passive-aggressive tendencies in the ranks.

Agreements about what should be started (and what should be stopped) are not clear or not even attempted. Resources stay attached, often fiercely so, to the current way of doing thingsso it's virtually impossible to do different or new stuff.

There is no such thing as a perfect organization, but there are also some fatal flaws that will prevent forward progress. When you have the wrong people in key roles or a structure that is competing against itself, you will stall. Or when you have groups or programs that are just not functioning properly, you burn huge amounts of time and energy recovering from work that should have been done better or differently or faster.

I personally find it very frustrating when organizations fail to progress, and I want to help.

There are answers to these chronic, systemic issues that stall forward progresspractical answers and doable things. Strategic investments actually can pay off. But the organizations that make their strategy successful do some specific things on purpose to accomplish it.