Introduction: What's Eating Glen Peterson?

Glen Peterson opened his eyes and instinctively brushed the back of his thumb across his lips in a quick search to track down any stray drool unbecoming of a well-mannered adult. A scan of the other snoozing passengers in the business-class cabin told him it would still be hours before his flight from Melbourne touched down at LAX.

"Now what?" he muttered to himself.

During his two decades of international travel, Glen had developed a habit of popping two Advil PMs shortly after takeoff, which usually knocked him out until the pilot announced the final descent. But this time was different. Glen had woken up just a few hours after falling asleep. He couldn't stop thinking about a comment that Priya-one of his most trusted team members and vice president of Davis Medical's Asia-Pacific region-had made during a team dinner in Melbourne the night before.

The dinner capped off a standard two-day meeting with key leaders from the Asia-Pacific team to check in on a number of key initiatives, and to discuss the rollout of the new strategy Glen's leadership team had put together a few weeks before. Glen had his assistant arrange for dinner plans at a family-style Italian restaurant, because he liked the low-key atmosphere and always felt that the simple act of dishing your food from common bowls was a solid, if not so subtle, way to reinforce the value he placed on cohesion and collegiality among his teams.

To Glen's dismay, the meal revealed more confusion than cohesion.

When the heaping dishes of food were placed on the center of the table, everyone just sat there for a moment staring at the massive spread of edible options, trying to decide where to begin. That's when Priya leaned over to Glen.

"It's funny," she said.

"What's that?" Glen had asked with a big smile, his eyes still fixed on the feast before them.

"I always get slightly nervous when I eat at a place like this." She shook her head and smiled sheepishly. "I look at all this delicious food, and I know that my stomach will not afford me all the space I need to try everything. So I have to choose wisely in the beginning, or I might not make it to the very best entrees."

"I know exactly what you mean!" Glen laughed. "Unfortunately for me," he said while patting his stomach, "I think I have a little too much spare room for sampling these days."

"Perhaps," Priya chuckled. Then her eyes narrowed. "Our new plan for the business is kind of like that," she said. "We have all these different bowls laid out before us, each of them filled up with heaps of initiatives and deliverables. It all looks so delicious and exciting, but something about it also makes me slightly nervous."

"Yeah, I guess anytime we do something new it is always a little exciting and a little nerve-wracking at the same time, isn't it?" Glen said.

"Yes, I suppose so," Priya continued. "But Glen, I think my concern about this plan is about more than just the anxiety of doing something new."

"Okay, now you've got me curious," Glen said. "Please do continue."

"It seems as though we have identified some rather significant changes to the way we want to do things in the coming year, correct?"

"Yes, you could certainly say that," Glen said.

"Well, I shared the plan with a couple of my savvier team members, James and Caroline, and-"

"Of course. I like them both a lot," Glen said. "Caroline in particular always impresses me."

"Yes, they are both very bright, Glen. That's what concerns me."

"Wait. You're concerned that you have two really bright team members? I think we need to give you more things to worry about," Glen said with a grin.

Priya laughed.

"I'm sorry," Glen said. "I interrupted you. Please go on. What concerns you?"

"Well, I asked them to explain the new plan to me the way they thought they would explain it to their own teams, and to tell me how they would go about their work differently each day given this new strategy. I wanted to test the plan on them-to see what stood out to them and.," Priya looked away for a moment, searching for the right words.

Glen leaned in. "And.?"

"They are two of the highest performers we have in our department and they almost completely missed the most critical changes to our plan this year. I suppose it's not fair to say that they 'missed' the changes. They did mention them. But I believe they missed the significance of the changes, and the implications for what they should be doing this year. The core of our plan is different in very important ways compared to what we've been doing in prior months. We are going to produce devices for a new target market that we've consciously avoided for as long as I've been with the company. To succeed, we really need our best people on the front lines thinking creatively every day about the new direction so they can spot the opportunities you and I can't see from our vantage point."

"Absolutely," Glen confirmed. "No question that we'll have to shift our focus."

"But.are we?" Priya's eyes shifted upward as she searched again for the right words. "Does our plan truly reflect a change in focus?"

Glen looked puzzled as Priya let her question hang there. "I think so," he said with a twinge of uncertainty in his voice.

"Glen, you know that I fully believe in our new direction. It's just that we produce so many new features and products every year that I'm afraid our people won't fully grasp why this one is different. This product fundamentally alters the terms of our relationships with customers. The margins will be different. The value proposition will be different. And James and Caroline don't fully comprehend how this plan changes much about what they do each day. They believe that their basic goals and priorities are the same as last year and the year before, plus with only the small addition of a couple of more priorities.

"And to be honest, Glen, I believe they are disappointed. James and Caroline can see the same opportunities that those of us on the leadership team identified at the planning retreat. They know how much healthcare reform is going to change the way we need to do business. And I think they were actually hoping for something a bit more.radical than the plan we produced. A plan that is undeniably different from previous years. They want to see a change as much as we do, but.well, they just aren't seeing it in the plan we've presented to them."

Glen felt his cheeks turning crimson. A decade or so ago, Glen might have snapped back with a pithy defense of the plan. He would sharply suggest that perhaps Priya just hadn't articulated the plan correctly. But with years of conscious effort Glen had trained himself to take a deep breath first in order to give his rational brain a chance to grab the tail of his lizard brain before it spewed out a conversation-killing rebuttal. After a moment, he realized that even if Priya hadn't presented the plan clearly enough, the failure was still his failure because it meant that he hadn't articulated it clearly enough to her.

"Hm. That's interesting," he said. To buy himself a few moments for collecting his thoughts, Glen reached for the fettuccine bowl and scooped some onto his plate. As he dug the spoon back into the pile of pasta, the untouched quinoa (pronounced "KEEN-wah") dish in the center of the table caught his eye. Then it hit him. Quinoa, he thought to himself. His wife had just recently introduced him to this so-called ancient grain that looked a lot like rice to him. But she explained that it was a healthier alternative to most of the standard pastas for which he had a lifelong weakness. He determined that a little extra quinoa would probably do his diet some good. So, tonight Glen had ordered quinoa in addition to the lasagna, the fettuccine Alfredo, the spaghetti bolognese, and the other staple Italian dishes.

That was the problem.

Glen slowly shook his head. "You're absolutely right. The changes to our plan are like the quinoa."

Priya raised a curious eyebrow and cocked her head to the side.

"The strategic shifts we've made are going to get lost in the smorgasbord of ongoing initiatives. We'll get things done this year, efficiently and effectively, just like we always do. But they won't be the right things.or at least not enough of the new things that are going to move us in that new direction." Glen paused and let out a big exhale. "I just assumed that simply ordering the quinoa would not only make me eat it, but that everyone else would notice something new on the table, and also dig right in.

"But they won't, will they?" Glen asked rhetorically. "Purely out of habit, they are going to reach for the stuff...