Why is everyone busy but nothing gets done. It is the question I get asked most often, usually in a corridor after a quarterly business review, from someone who lowers their voice slightly, as if the observation is a small act of disloyalty. It is not. It is usually...
One of my favourite questions to ask a leadership team who has brought me in to help them figure out how to fix a lack of ownership in their cross-functional teams is, “Who actually owns this?” That’s when things start to unravel real quick because people point in all...
I get asked to help design a strategy roadshow more often than almost any other format, and the trigger is rarely the calendar. Sometimes it is a board that has just approved a three-year plan and wants the direction in front of every site within a month. Sometimes it...
Every CEO, CHRO, chief of staff, strategy director and head of internal communications I meet in the weeks after a strategy cascade, a manager summit or a run of divisional town halls asks a version of the same question, usually not out loud: did it land? The...
Stand at the front of a leadership briefing and ask the room a simple question: what happens to this strategy the moment it leaves the building? Most executive teams haven’t thought about it, because the room they’re standing in feels like the finish line....
Ask one person on the shop floor what the organisation is doing this year, and you’ll get an honest answer: they’ll tell you what they remember, not what was said. Ask the next person, and you’ll get a different honest answer. Neither of them is...
