The Campaign Orchestrator assumes overall responsibility for the success of a campaign.

What does it take to overwhelm the enormous bureaucratic inertia of an organization and move rapidly towards the new vision or strategy?

All earthly things have a beginning and an end. Yet few leaders spend effort planning the end game—despite ample evidence that it is critically important.

years, Motorola had been organized into separate product lines: a paging unit, a two-way radio unit, a cell phone unit, a cellular infrastructure unit and a satellite unit. The problem with this structure was that the market, driven by demand for mobile communications, was changing very rapidly and Motorola was having difficulty meeting the changing needs of its major customers. These customers were consolidating and, at the same time, were looking for more integrated communication solutions.

Meanwhile, demand was exploding, competition was intensifying and end-user expectations were increasing. People wanted cheaper, smaller, and more universal devices. They no longer wanted to carry around multiple personal productivity devices—a pager, a cell phone, a palm top computer—to meet their mobility needs. They wanted these devices and the related services to be integrated.

But Motorola had an organizational problem. Because the product lines were effectively operational silos, it was difficult if not impossible to offer customers an integrated solution. So the decision was made to create a fully integrated business unit—the Communications Enterprise—that would bring everything together.

Sandy Ogg, Corporate Vice President and Director of the company’s Office of Leadership, was part of the founding leadership team of the new organization.

Deciding to create the Communications Enterprise group was the easy part. Making change happen was a challenge that required a rapid, massive change management effort. After consulting with us, Ogg decided to apply many of the concepts presented in our book, Winning In FastTime. Sandy recalls his thought process:

While Motorola is, by organizational standards, quite large with 80,000 employees and $22 billion in sales. What are some of the big leverage points (Centers of Gravity) in a system like that? We identified leaders, core business processes and structure, and big revenue hitters and cost drivers as priorities.

Our next step was to develop five parallel campaigns with enough energy and focus to overwhelm the leverage points in an integrated way. The key was to have the campaigns tightly focused and not just have a bunch of initiatives. We had a few big ones designed to overwhelm the system.

How does Motorola—or any company—go about organizing such an effort? The answer is to commission campaign teams. The first step is to select a Campaign Orchestrator.

Winners recognize that it’s impossible to do anything about uncontrollable factors – the economy, the competitors, the customers. Winners focus on controlling the controllable, which is their own performance.

What is “winning?” Is it being awarded a Gold Medal at the Olympic Games or a Nobel Prize? Becoming a millionaire? Having a great family life? Making the honor role? Learning to walk again after a serious accident? Leading a happy, fulfilling life?

“Winning” could encompass all of the above because, fundamentally, “winning” is about setting out to achieve a goal and succeeding.

What do you suppose prevents the vast majority of worth goals from being achieved? The most common obstacle is behavioral inertia.  Individuals and whole organizations tend to continue their status quo behaviors ─ cultural norms ─ even when they are obviously counter-productive.

Most scholars and thought leaders now recognize that alignment of cultural norms with strategy is a key indicator of enduring improvement in performance. This conclusion is based on a wide array of research findings. For example:

•           74 of 75 highly regarded industry financial analysts reported that culture is a critical success factor in long-term financial performance.

•           Studies in over 100 organizations engaged in TQM and downsizing found that performance improvement depended upon concurrent culture change.

•           Neglect of the cultural aspect is the most often cited reason for failure of strategies, e.g., without real adjustments in the way people think, feel and behave, there is a very low probability of success (widely cited failure rate is 80-90%).

•           In addition to the organizational-level effects, the impact of culture on individuals (e.g., employee morale, commitment, productivity, physical health and emotional well-being) is also well documented.

The Execution Leadership Principle, Adopt Winning Behaviors, is about the how-to of aligning cultural norms with strategy. It provides guidelines for defining and practicing the leadership behaviors that will help you achieve success.

All earthly things have a beginning and an end. Yet few leaders spend effort planning the end game—despite ample evidence that it is critically important.

Without pre-considered Exit Points, we inevitably find ourselves fighting desperate battles to save something that is no longer relevant. Because we hate to give up anything, we’ll go to extraordinary lengths to continue on a course that was fine yesterday but is no longer germane.

On the other hand, if we define Exit Points in advance, everyone is much more comfortable with the exit process, because they know it will be done with style, and because they know it will free up energy to do something more profitable and exciting. So, plan early.

When you begin your new company, product or project, define the criteria for the Exit Point—that moment in time beyond which you will experience diminishing returns. Well-defined criteria for an Exit Point will help you:

•           Maximize (and retain) your financial gains by ensuring that you exit at the right time. It is possible, for example, to squander all of your gains from a once-profitable product or service in a fruitless attempt to revive something that’s in terminal collapse. This is the phenomenon known as “snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.”

•           Minimize your losses by “failing fast.” The Exit Point criteria will help you recognize when something isn’t working. It provides a rational way to terminate failures quickly and decisively while the cost of failure is still relatively low. Without such Exit Point criteria, you could be seduced by the “sunk-cost trap” that allows failures to drag on and on because you don’t want to lose what has been invested.

•           End the game while you are strong. The right Exit Point will leave you in the strongest possible position—not only financially, but psychologically— to launch your next effort.

If you don’t define the Exit Point criteria early on, you have no formal way of evaluating when the end is near. Even if you do recognize it, the natural human tendency to “give it just one more chance” will take over.

In the business world, winners tend to get out while the “getting is good.” How do they know when that moment arrives?

There are several signals of the Exit Point for a product, service or organization:

•           Valuation Zenith

•           Declining Returns

•           Strategic Shifts

FastTime® Planning at the International Leadership Association

This post introduces an article by Shelly Wisley, Director the International Leadership Association (ILA). Shelly explains how the ILA Board of Directors used the FastTime® Collaboration Center tools for an iterative retreat preparation process. Early each week, the board members would respond to an online survey with a short set of strategic questions. Later in the week there would be a teleconference to review the survey results and deepen our understanding of the various issues and perspectives.

Also, if you’ve ever been frustrated by a meeting dominated by just a few voices, and had difficulty reaching consensus, you’ll appreciate Shelly’s explanation of how the ILA board was able to rapidly identify points of agreement and issues for discussion during in face-to-face strategic planning retreat and  move quickly toward consensus for action.

The structures of the past rarely fit the exigencies of the future.

In the early days of the Roman Empire, the leaders of the Imperial Legions organized them for success by basing most units in Rome, and keeping them ready for dispatch to wherever they were needed for seizing an opportunity or solving a problem. Traveling a superbly designed Roman road system, the well-trained, fully equipped legions could reach the periphery of the empire with remarkable speed. As soon as the situation was handled, the legions returned to Rome, ready again to respond rapidly in any direction.

Executing your strategies is a similar challenge. Like the Romans, you need a dynamic structure that allows you to be fast, nimble, and continuously self-adapting. You need a structure that makes it easier to assemble the right resources and to deploy them at the right times against the right Leverage Points.

New Situation, New Structure

How do you ensure that your strategies realize their full potential? Create an organizational structure that will support, rather than hinder their success.

Organizational structure is important because it shapes individual behaviors and causes certain patterns of events to reoccur. By changing the structure, you can create new behaviors and new patterns of events that will increase the probability of success.

Organizational structure is a choice, not a given. There’s no law that says, “When faced with new challenges or new opportunities, you must rely on the current organizational structure to address them.” That kind of rigidity would be ridiculous. Yet, that’s often the unspoken assumption. Most organizations find it difficult to make fast, fundamental structural changes. But is maintaining the status quo a sustainable alternative?

When you design a new strategy, develop a new kind of product, or face new forms of competition, your old organizational structure is obsolete for a very simple reason: it was designed for a situation that no longer exists. So there’s an urgent need to adapt.

When it is clear and compelling, your Future Picture becomes a valuable navigational aid, a constant beacon toward which everyone in the organization can steer over time.

Leadership In FastTime® Principle Two, Design Your Future Picture, is an antidote for the knee-jerk solutions that compound current problems and fail to move you in a strategically smart direction. It provides leadership guidelines for setting stretch objectives and shaping effective strategies and success measures.

There are two ways to Design Your Future Picture—inductively or deductively.  The inductive approach is bottom up: begin with extensive research and detailed analysis of the facts you have gathered; then, extrapolate your way up to an overall design concept.

The sheer volume of facts in today’s information haystack makes the bottom up approach a daunting task.  Even if you could gather 100% of the available facts and instantly analyze them (highly unlikely), the design you develop from those facts would have an extremely short shelf life.  Facts can become fiction overnight.  This is the fallacy of the traditional strategic planning, says Henry Mintzberg, author of The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. “The world is supposed to hold still while a plan is being developed and then stay on the predicted course while that plan is being implemented.”

Information overload is now a universal dilemma.  No matter where you look—business, education, healthcare, or government— you find people feeling overwhelmed by the mind-numbing volume of data that bombards them each day.  In this environment the inductive, bottom up approach is simply too slow and difficult and the plan that emerges too tenuous.

So what is the Leadership In FastTime® solution?

Use a deductive, top down approach.  First, think creatively about the high-level outcomes you want to achieve.  Then, they move down level-by-level into the details.  At each level, on a just-in-time basis, identify what information is required to make decisions. This will greatly narrow the need for research and expedite the information gathering process.

The deductive, top down approach is the way architects approach design: they begin with broad creative ideas from which details can be subsequently developed and executed.

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Winning In FastTime® Cardinal Rules keep you on a smart track and greatly increase your likelihood of Excellence In Execution.

What is winning? Is it being awarded a Gold Medal at the Olympic Games or a Nobel Prize? Becoming a millionaire? Having a great family life? Making the honor role? Learning to walk again after a serious accident? Leading a happy, fulfilled life?

The FastTime® definition of “winning” encompasses all of the above: It is setting out to do something and succeeding in doing it quickly and effectively. This is Winning In FastTime®.

Winning In FastTime® has twelve Cardinal Rules that will keep you on a smart track and greatly increase your likelihood of Excellence In Execution.

Click here for the full article on “Twelve Cardinal Rules for Winning In FastTime®”.

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The basic formula for winning in the 21st century is simple: think strategically, focus sharply and move quickly.

What does it take to win in a world where change is not only rapid but accelerating, where ancient “truths” collapse with disconcerting regularity, where fortunes are made and lost in hours and months rather than in decades?

The basic formula for winning in the 21st century is simple: Think Strategically, Focus Sharply and Move Quickly. We’ve labeled this Winning In FastTime®.

This was the success formula for the first hyper-war—the Desert Storm air campaign.  Because it achieved such a rapid, decisive victory that harnessed revolutionary concepts about strategy, it contains valuable lessons for leadership in the fast-changing world of the 21st century.

Click here for the full article on “Winning In FastTime: A Game Changing Approach to Execution”.

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EXECUTIVE TRANSITIONS are one of the critical leadership issues for every organization. This study addresses the best practices for ensuring success in Executive Transitions..

Three Excellence In Execution leadership mindsets—Think Strategically, Focus Sharply, Move Quickly—are the foundation of Leadership In FastTime®. Together, they provide a comprehensive mental model with achieving breakthrough performance.

By practicing nine proven principles, you can translates the Leadership In FastTime® mindsets into effective action.

Leadership Principle Nine, LEAD THE TRANSITIONS, is an antidote for the weak beginnings and endings that waste valuable time and resources. It provides leadership guidelines for starting initiatives and projects in a smart way and finishing them with finnesse to maximize results.

EXECUTIVE TRANSITIONS are one of the critical transitions for every organization. This is especially true today given that both the number of executive transitions and the complexity is expected to increase dramatically. According to a study by Booz Allen Hamilton in 2007, global CEO turnover is at roughly 15%, the highest it has been in the past decade.  Other studies point to 40% of new leaders failing within the first 18 months.  Aon Consulting reports there is a 50% chance an executive will quit or be fired within his first three years.

The cost of failure with executive transitions can be significant.  Along with direct costs of recruiting, sign on bonuses, and exit packages, come numerous indirect costs which can be even greater such as alienated employees, customers, suppliers, and tarnished brand image.

The Institute of Executive Development and Alexcel Group conducted an Executive Transitions Market Study to get a deeper understanding of this critical issue. Their study examined:

• Transitions that top executives make into and through organizations
• Road blocks that can occur in the process
• Organizational roles and processes that may facilitate such transitions and change.

A few key lessons learned have emerged for leadership:  Focus on early wins while learning as much as you can about the culture, what your team needs, whose opinion counts, and with whom you need to create partnerships.  While both business acumen and people acumen are essential, failure tends to happen when the latter is ignored, as we will see in this report.

“These lessons are important for leaders and organizations to understand,” says leadership development expert and executive coach Patricia Wheeler, Managing Partner of The Levin Group and current Managing Director of Alexcel Group, “because they expect internal transfers to be seamless and require little help; our results show that, in fact, this is not the case. As 20% of senior executives are not successful when they change roles internally,companies need to take notice. Our results suggest that a relatively small amount of time, if invested correctly, will help senior executives assimilate in their new roles and may prevent the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars and work-hours.”

Click here to gain access to the “Executive Transitions Market Study Summary Report”

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“Execution” is the leadership challenge most commonly mentioned by leaders today—regardless of size of company or type of industry.

“EXECUTION” is the leadership challenge most commonly mentioned by leaders today—regardless of size of company or type of industry. Behind this trend is a fundamental fact: it’s increasingly tough at the top. No, I mean really tough.

Leaders today are facing a ‘perfect storm’ of complexity and change created by an unprecedented array of driving forces. The pace of communications, the blurring of geographic boundaries and the instantaneous mobility of ideas spawn new challenges. Competition is no longer predictable in time, place, or specifics. Disruptive innovations, appearing seemingly overnight, can suddenly endanger a long-successful business or make an entire industry obsolete. In this environment—the New Normal—even the most vaunted leadership practices may not be enough.

The Leadership In FastTime® Model is a proven formula for Excellence In Execution in the New Normal. The benefits of applying it are faster, better results in thinking, planning and implementation that together drive breakthrough performance.

Whether you are a seasoned leader at the top or an emerging leader on the way up, the Leadership In FastTime® Model can help you and your organization improve Execution performance because:

• The three mindsets—Think Strategically, Focus Sharply, Move Quickly—provide the essential conceptual framework for Excellence In Execution Leadership in the New Normal.
• The nine leadership principles provide guidelines for anticipating and overcoming the common obstacles to Excellence In Execution.
• Each leadership principle is translated into practical actions that can be measured, evaluated and reinforced to ensure performance improvement.
• The Model’s “Rule of Three” architecture—three leadership mindsets, each mindset has three leadership principles and each principle has three leadership actions—makes it easy to learn and apply.
• It is a disciplined, proven methodology that focuses on the Execution leadership practices, processes and tools that leaders, managers and mission-critical teams need to win.

When you think about the potential value of learning and applying the Leadership In FastTime® Model personally, or in your organization, consider these questions:

• What are your most significant Execution challenges and opportunities today?
• What are some of the potential costs of delay in solving even one of those problems?
• What are some of the potential benefits of acceleration of even one opportunity?

Click here to download the complete article on “How To Meet Your Number One Leadership Challenge”.

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