It is an all-too-familiar scenario. Corporation X misses badly on its commitments several quarters in a row and the stock plummets. As a result, the Board loses confidence, the CEO resigns, and a new CEO is appointed who immediately announces a sweeping restructure of the corporation.
In the past few years, papers have been inundated with such reports. Even at corporations where top-level executives show signs of vision and have articulated what seems to be a sound business strategy on paper, results fall short of expectations.
We have all been there at one point or another in our careers. The leadership team spends long hours agreeing on a 3- or 5-year strategy to improve the performance of the business. Management teams work equally hard to come up with supportive annual budgets. Both teams populate long PowerPoint presentations and well-built, exhaustive spreadsheet files. Yet not much happens in terms of actual deliverables! Ambitious year-end targets are missed. Improvement curves keep being shifted to the right, until the scenario at the beginning of this article is realized. Now the process for restructure of the corporation begins.
Questions...