Who's in the Room?

Introduction: Who's in the Room? 1 PART ONE: FROM PROBLEM TO PORTFOLIO 5 1 Most Companies Are Run by Teams with No Names 7 The Myth of the Top Team Illusion and Reality The Problem That Isn't There, But Won't Go Away 2 Team Building Won't Solve the Problem 21 When the Shrinks Go Marching In After the Shrinks Have Gone 3 Don't Blame the Boss 29 In Search of the Ideal Leader Inside the Box Do the ''Rights'' Thing 4 Four Fundamental Conflicts at the Heart of Senior Management Teams 41 Mission Control Versus Knights of the Round Table: Functional Specialists or Reflections of the CEO? The Team Versus the Legislature: The Representative from Finance, the Senator from Operations The House Versus the Senate: Are Some More Equal Than Others? The Majority Versus the Majority: The Impossibility of Deciding Maybe the Problem Is That There Is No Problem 5 Case Study: How One CEO Transformed His Top Team 57 The Past as Prologue Moving from a Single Top Team to Multiple Teams The Team That Sits Together Works Together Tailoring the Structure to Suit Your Needs as a Leader 6 Best Practices: Design an Organization That Delivers the Outcomes You Need 73 The Three Centers of Gravity Flexing in Five Dimensions The Portfolio and the Payoff PART TWO: THE SENIOR MANAGEMENT TEAM UNBOUND 91 7 Engage the Senior Management Team in Three Critical Conversations No Other Team Can Have 93 8 Align the Senior Management Team Around a Common View of the World 99 The Starting Point: Aligning Around Trends Clustering Trends into Drivers of Change Understanding Capabilities and Assets Walking the Boundaries of the Company: TestingWalls and Fences Defining and Selecting Opportunities 9 Prioritize and Integrate Initiatives to Hit the Strategic Bull's-Eye 119 Asking the Nearly Impossible: Prioritizing Initiatives The Real Source of the Difficulty Changing the Conversation It's All Relative Hitting the Bull's-Eye: Making Initiatives Work Together 10 Move from ''Should We Do This?'' to ''How Do We Do This?'' 145 It All Depends: Why Initiatives Fail Putting on the Brakes: The Value of Parochialism The American Red Cross: Managing Dependencies at the Speed of Disaster Going from ''Should'' to ''How'' Fixing What's Actually Broken 11 Tailor Your Portfolio of Teams for Top Performance Now 167 Thinking It Through Putting the New Approach into Motion Repurposing the SMT Who's in the Room? Acknowledgments 179 The Author 183 Index 185