CEO, General Manager

You are new to your executive position as a result of a merger, acquisition, organizational restructuring, or need for new leadership. You know that the time to create the strategic changes you were hired to make is now. Your leadership team is a mix of incumbents and people you are hiring. You have a good idea about the extent and direction of necessary change and need your leadership team to help you make it complete and achievable.

You believe you must do one or more of the following:

• Align your leadership team to one future state of the business and the strategy and actions necessary to achieve it.

• Gain alignment and commitment to a 90 day Action Plan to turn around a specific business performance or leadership performance situation

• Balance your leadership team’s focus between achieving short term commitments and implementing long term strategy

• Create the capacity among your team members for valuable conversations and rapid decision-making - both of which are in short supply today

• Build the business acumen of your team to enable it to function on behalf of the entire firm and not just the silos they manage

• Define and implement accountability for strategy definition, implementation, and results

Chief Strategy Officer - CSO

You are accountable for assuring that the organization’s strategic planning processes add credible, discernable value. Your customers are the CEO and the business and functional leadership team, but many people contribute to plan development and implementation. Your planning or
development team includes ad hoc members and/or functional representatives.

You believe you must do one or more of the following:

• Quickly fix a strategic planning and implementation process that is viewed as not driving action and results, and taking forever to complete

• Make sure that all of your executives are engaged with and committed to the business strategy

• Enable your executives to have meaningful conversations about the organization’s strategy that lead to a higher level of leadership understanding and performance

• Transform the planning process from one where participants advocate for their silos and projects to one where all participants are committed to achieving one business strategy

• Create a lean governance process for managing your strategic processes, including strategy definition, execution, measurement, and strategic initiative/issue management

Chief Financial Officer - CFO

You lead the finance organization for a global business or major business unit and report to the CEO or Business Unit general manager.  Your operational responsibilities may include treasury, management accounting, external reporting, regulatory reporting, internal audit, and risk management.

Your organization’s costs are absorbed by the P&Ls of your firm’s businesses.  You believe your teams do essential work -- but your funders question whether they are getting their money’s worth and don’t know how your services add value to their top and bottom line.

You believe you must do one or more of the following:

• Dramatically improve the quality of financial analysis and communications to the CEO, P&L business executives, and major users of your services.

• Demonstrate to the executives of the P&L businesses how your processes enable their operations to be more effective

• Create the capacity among your team members for valuable conversations and rapid decision-making - both of which are in short supply today

• Enable your senior business analysts to create value flows that  demonstrate how operational performance drives balance sheet, P&L, and environmental and social responsibility outcomes

Shared Services Executive

You lead a collection of vertical and horizontal service functions and report to the CEO or an EVP. Your organization’s costs are absorbed by the P&Ls of your firm’s businesses. Each service has its own constituencies, governance systems, and processes. You believe your teams do essential work -- but your funders question whether they are getting their money’s worth and don’t know how your services add value to their top and bottom line.

You believe you must do one or more of the following:

• Transform your organization from one of disparate activities to one that leverages knowledge and processes to improve performance and reduce costs to the businesses

• Demonstrate to the executives of the P&L businesses who fund your organization’s services how your processes enable their processes to be more effective

• Look for quick wins from your team’s efforts now to gain credibility and to buy time for the things that will take longer to fix, define, or implement

• Define and link your organization’s contributions via Service Level Agreements at lower business levels and value agreements and measurement at executive P&L levels

• Build a culture within shared services based upon contributing required value to client businesses, not the successful implementation of functional programs

Measurement System Executive

You’ve inherited the task of developing better metrics of organizational performance and a measurement system that is used and valued in the organization. Your customers are the CEO and executive leadership, but many people use the system and also contribute to generating and reporting performance. You are confronted with outdated metrics, calls for an array of alternative metrics, and an overwhelming set of alternative measurement frameworks and tools.

You believe you must do one or more of the following:

• Charter the roles of you and your team with executive management so that your value-add is clear and you agree on what should happen when you deliver committed results

• Create a rapid process for defining and implementing the measurement system and new metrics that adapts to business and sponsor changes with little disruption

• Assess the needs and expectations of the CEO and each executive regarding what a measurement system must enable them to do and what others systems it must align with

• Look for quick wins from your team’s efforts now to gain credibility and to buy time for the things that will take longer to fix, define, or implement

• Define and implement metrics that better reflect current business objectives, balance strategic and operational performance, and promote how work should get done

Strategic Initiative Leader

You’ve been appointed to lead an initiative to solve a vexing strategic problem for your firm – one that continues to exist despite prior attempts to fix it. You are building a team of people from around the organization to help you. Time is short, your resources are limited, the problem is getting worse – and you are under intense scrutiny by your sponsors and constituents. You need to demonstrate a credible plan and begin to show progress yesterday.

You believe you must do one or more of the following:

• Charter the roles of you and your team with executive management so that your value-add is clear and you agree on what should happen when you deliver committed results

• Gain alignment and commitment from sponsors and key constituents to a common definition of the problem and their role in making the initiative successful

• Create the capacity among your team members for valuable conversations and rapid decision-making - both of which are in short supply today

• Create a governance system that formalizes how you will run the initiative, engage with sponsors, manage issues, and gain endorsement of your recommendations

• Engage the right people in the firm to specify issues and sources of resistance, identify creative alternative solutions, evaluate the best alternatives, and draft a recommendation

• Develop a credible implementation plan for your recommendations that minimizes implementation risks and monitors both progress and value recovered for the firm

Key Account – Strategic Alliance Leader

You are accountable for the strategic relationship with a major customer or other value chain partner, which is strained and under-performing relative to its potential. Much of your time is spent trying to align and integrate your firm’s efforts across product, supply chain, and sales functions. These functions don’t share your objectives, don’t understand what the customer / partner values, and don’t know how to deliver solutions that cross internal boundaries.

You believe you must do one or more of the following:

• Understand and reconcile how your functions should support alliance objectives, and identify / resolve your internal barriers to a successful relationship with your partner

• With your alliance partner, rapidly identify and evaluate shared opportunities, prioritize and select alternatives, develop action plans, and gain executive endorsement

• With your key customers, deeply understand the customer experience they must deliver to its customers, and determine how your organization specifically enables its success

• Develop and implement a detailed system with your customer that defines and monitors how your processes work together to jointly deliver the desired customer experience