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Leadership Lessons from McKinsey

July 31st, 2009 | Leadership, Product Management, Roadmaps, Strategy

mckmain_logo Another great article from McKinsey. Do you subscribe? I just finished reading “Leadership lessons for hard times by Dennis Carey, Michael Patsalos-Fox, and Michael Useem. Here are some thought provoking comments…
 

Phil Hildebrand, of HealthMarkets, and Steve Miller, of Delphi, both remarked on the importance of decisiveness to prevent problems from escalating. But it can be hard to achieve in the absence of perfect data.

Did he mean perfect or accurate? What are you measuring to help you make decisions?

“The world moves at a pace that requires strategy to be front and center all of the time,” says NCR’s Bill Nuti.

How often you are reviewing your strategy? Weekly? Why not?

“People will take any hill, walk into the worst situation, if they have faith in your leadership and know what your strategy and objectives are,” says Tyco’s Breen.

There is lots of talk in the industry about leadership and communication. As product managers, with a constant craving to ask why, you have to believe that the others on the team as asking why too. Share your ideas and tell them why and listen to feedback.

While acknowledging current difficulties, it is just as important to emphasize what is being done to build a company’s longer-term health. Fishman, like others, has spent much time talking about his company’s mid- and long-term strategy…

The reality is that there is never a valid excuse for taking your eye off the long-term strategy. Sure your definition of long-term might be different someone else’s definition of long-term, but you need to be constantly planning and feeding the planning engine with data.

If you don’t invest in the future and don’t plan for the future, there won’t be one.—George Buckley, chairman, president, and CEO of 3M

Not sure I need to add anything else to this.

Image Source: The McKinsey Quarterly
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    • davidlocke

      A decision cycle that runs faster than the decision's implementation cycle is not going to have any measurement of outcomes. OODA loops are wonderful, but ideally they alter the context of future loops. Changing that context requires time. Stable context is required for measurement. Run too fast, and you never catch up.

      We use numbers to manage. Those numbers are blunt instruments that ignore quite a bit. We can data mine our data, but not our policies. Without business rules technology, our policies take time to change. While they change, we keep on collecting numbers as if their basis were unchanged. After they change, we refer to the past as if the basis were unchanged. We hide discontinuities in our linear, continuous assumptions. The numbers cannot scream out “Hey, we are invalid!”

      A race car has a faster suspension, faster tires, a faster engine, faster braking. If you want to change your strategy on a dime, the rest of the organization's systems must do the same.

    • Anonymous

      A decision cycle that runs faster than the decision’s implementation cycle is not going to have any measurement of outcomes. OODA loops are wonderful, but ideally they alter the context of future loops. Changing that context requires time. Stable context is required for measurement. Run too fast, and you never catch up.

      We use numbers to manage. Those numbers are blunt instruments that ignore quite a bit. We can data mine our data, but not our policies. Without business rules technology, our policies take time to change. While they change, we keep on collecting numbers as if their basis were unchanged. After they change, we refer to the past as if the basis were unchanged. We hide discontinuities in our linear, continuous assumptions. The numbers cannot scream out “Hey, we are invalid!”

      A race car has a faster suspension, faster tires, a faster engine, faster braking. If you want to change your strategy on a dime, the rest of the organization’s systems must do the same.

    • davidlocke

      A decision cycle that runs faster than the decision's implementation cycle is not going to have any measurement of outcomes. OODA loops are wonderful, but ideally they alter the context of future loops. Changing that context requires time. Stable context is required for measurement. Run too fast, and you never catch up.

      We use numbers to manage. Those numbers are blunt instruments that ignore quite a bit. We can data mine our data, but not our policies. Without business rules technology, our policies take time to change. While they change, we keep on collecting numbers as if their basis were unchanged. After they change, we refer to the past as if the basis were unchanged. We hide discontinuities in our linear, continuous assumptions. The numbers cannot scream out “Hey, we are invalid!”

      A race car has a faster suspension, faster tires, a faster engine, faster braking. If you want to change your strategy on a dime, the rest of the organization's systems must do the same.

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