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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 here indicate:

  • We had so-called priorities such as "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.

Who Has Used the Must-Win Battle Approach?

A core premise of this book is that the MWB approach needs to be tailored to the situation facing each company and executive team intending to use it—it is not "one size fits all." However, we have found that the key MWB concepts, and the focus on developing strategy and team commitment at the same time, have worked well in a wide variety of companies.

Some of the companies that have adopted the MWB concept have been small; one has less than 100 employees. The largest, on the other hand, has hundreds of thousands of employees and more than €21 billion in revenue. The companies also span a wide range of technologies and industries, including chemicals, pharmaceuticals, fast-moving consumer goods, beverages, professional services, and food ingredients. Although the businesses we have worked with have been based in many parts of the world—North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—some of the leadership teams have been culturally diverse while others have not. The MWB battle approach has been effective regardless of the degree of cultural diversity, although we usually find the process to be more challenging as the diversity of the management team increases.

The executives we worked with came from a variety of levels in their organizations. In some cases, we started at the very top of the organization and then cascaded the initiative to lower levels. In other organizations, the impetus came from senior managers, such as the head of a country, region, or business unit.

The breadth of this experience leads us to believe that the must-win battle concept can effectively be used by executives at many levels in an organization, in companies both large and small, and across industries and geographies. The challenge for you as a reader is to decide if this approach could help you address the issues you face in your business today, or those you expect to face in the future.

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