May 1, 2008
Audio interview: defining ‘must-win’ strategic battles
Senior management teams are great at coming up with strategic priorities, to the extent that many are drowning in them. But while it is platitudinous to point out that the existence of too many goals confuses staff and leads to sketchy execution, the path to rectifying strategic overload is less obvious. Yet Peter Killing, a professor at IMD, the Swiss business school, says there is a clear method that bosses can use to define and approach their company’s “must-win battles”. You can listen to him detail these steps in a 16-minute audio interview here, or click on the rest of this post for a written summary.
Prof Killing, who was in London earlier this week for an IMD alumni evening, suggests that the chief executive take 10-15 members of their top team to a remote location to brainstorm for 3-5 days. He’s run such workshops in Finnish fishing cabins, for instance. “The key is to get away from head office and get away from any specific location in which any of the participants actually operates.”
The first step is to find out how each participant views the current state of the company. At the IMD alumni evening, Prof Killing suggested that those present place their own company on a graph that showed an arc of improving and then declining performance. He also suggests role playing to simulate outside perspectives on the state of the company, asking participants to imagine that they are an analyst, for instance.
The next step is to seek a consensus on where the company wants to be in the future, perhaps five years hence (the time period will depend on the industry). “If we can agree where we are today and agree where we want to get to, then the must-win battles are the battles… that we need to win to take us from today to that future that we want.”
Ideally, the workshop should identify 3-5 essential strategic challenges or “must-win battles”. Prof Killing says these should each fulfil five criteria. They should:
- Have a major impact on the whole organisation, as opposed to just one part of it;
- Be focused on the external market place, as opposed to being an internal turf issue;
- Be aspirational rather than incremental;
- Be tangible and measurable;
- Be winnable.
One way to minimise turf wars during these workshops is to make sure that all participants have the same information beforehand - something that is especially relevant for technical or geographical issues (China, for instance) where one participant might have an in-built advantage over the others. But Prof Killing says some confrontation can be cathartic: “Let it happen - that’s when you have the breakthrough.”
Finally, the trickiest part: the bosses must get the support of the rest of the organisation for the new strategy when they return to the office. Prof Killing says that one way of doing this is to sit workshop participants in front of 80-150 top managers for a formal debriefing and question and answer session. Rank-and-file employees can be briefed in subsequent events. Meanwhile, the structure of the company and its pay policy can be reshaped around the new strategic priorities.
