Board chairs, directors and CEOs heading into a strategy retreat often say some version of the same thing: “We want an outside perspective on strategy.” Fair enough. But ask what that means in practice, and the answer is often an hour of good content, not...
Every board says it values constructive challenge in the boardroom. Most directors do challenge, too. Ask a chair, a CEO or the company secretary organising the next strategy retreat, and they’ll all tell you the room isn’t short on good questions. The...
Picture the room at a board strategy day. It’s full of capable, serious people: the chair, directors, the CEO and CFO, the chief of staff who assembled the pack, the company secretary keeping a careful record of what actually gets resolved. And more often than...
Before a strategy retreat or board strategy day most board chairs, directors, CEOs and CFOs want to know: how do you stress-test a strategic decision when the paper in front of you is thorough, the numbers hold up, and the people presenting it are the ones you trust...
Execution discipline for long programs is not the same problem as execution discipline for a six-week rollout. A short initiative can survive on launch energy because it finishes before that energy runs out. A multi-year program cannot: it will outlive its launch...
Somewhere around month twelve of a multi-year program, someone on the leadership team says the quiet part out loud: this has lost the room. The steering pack still gets produced, the updates still go out, but nobody believes it’s actually going anywhere, and...
