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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Must-Win Battles: How to Win Them, Again and AgainMust-Win Battles: How to Win Them, Again and Again

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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Must-Win Battles: How to Win Them, Again and AgainMust-Win Battles: How to Win Them, Again and Again

Learn More Buy

What Problem Are We Solving?

If MWBs are the solution, what’s the problem? Why do senior managers embark on MWB journeys? Although every manager we have worked with had his or her own reasons for the journey, what they had in common was a frustration with the current performance of their business and an impatience for improvement. They did not feel that incremental nudging or fine-tuning would bring about the necessary performance improvement. So they wanted to do something outside the norm to bring focus and energy to their teams, as their comments below indicate.

We had so-called priorities like "innovate more" which meant almost nothing. It was more a slogan than anything else. We needed to create real ownership of a few key priorities, that would bring us the passion, focus, risk taking, and entrepreneurship that we needed. Business as usual would not get us there.

We were too academic; we tried to make things perfect instead of making decisions. We were great at debates. Analysis drove out action.

We were a group of individuals in silos, not a team. There was no openness and even less trust. I had to break the prevailing mind set.

We were too internally focused, always talking about what we could and could not do. We need to concentrate on what we need to do to win in our markets and get on with it.

We were a group of talented people, producing mediocre results. The potential to do much, much better was there.

A careful reading of these quotes suggests that these managers actually faced two problems, in addition to the fundamental fact that their businesses were not performing well. One was that their organizations were not clear on where they were going because of too many initiatives or conflicting priorities, and the other was that their management "teams" were far from being teams. So one problem was a lack of shared strategic priorities, and the other had to do with the attitudes and behavior of the members of the management team. If this is the situation you face, your MWB journey needs to deal with both of these issues–it is no use focusing on one and ignoring the other.

For the Reader who Is not Part of a Large Organization (and Maybe does not Want to Be!)

If you are part of the leadership team of a small or medium-sized business you may feel that the issues facing the large international organizations that we discuss in this book have little in common with the challenges that you are facing. Our advice: do not stop reading. We have undertaken MWB journeys with companies like yours, and the issues are usually more similar than you might think.

First, Phase One of the MWB journey focuses on engaging a small team. Whether it is the top team of the company or the whole company staff, the same principles apply: you want to create strategic focus and get everyone committed to the new agenda. And even if you do not need the Phase Two cascade of the battles through the organization, you still need to embed the battles, create and maintain momentum around them, and monitor their success over time. Doing this in a large organization will be more complex than in a small one, but the challenges are similar.

Second, the marriage of intellectual rigor with emotional commitment is universally important. The leaders in the smallest entrepreneurial ventures probably know better than those in multinational behemoths that people with passion for a goal are critical for success. Just look at eBay, Google, or even BMW–all started small but had these vital characteristics.

So, before you switch off, skim the rest of this chapter, if not the whole book, because we think, regardless of the size of your organization, you will find ideas and tools that can help you move your organization forward.

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