208 pages
At the top of every organization chart lies a myth - that the boss and senior management team make all the critical decisions together. In reality, most decisions are actually made by the boss and an inner circle of confidents - a "team with no name" that exists outside formal processes.
This gap between the myth and reality of decision making causes significant problems. Executives wonder why they weren't consulted either. Bosses wonder why teams members have trouble grasping the big picture. There's a tension in the executive suite, and repeated attempts at team building don't seem to resolve it.
In Who's In The Room?, Bob Frisch provides a unique perspective to this widely misunderstood issue. Flying in the face of decades of organizational psychology, he argues that the solution lies not in addressing behaviors, but in unseating the senior management team as the epicenter of decision making. Using a broad protfolio of teams - large adn small, permanent and temporary, formal adn informal - great leaders match each decision to the appropriate team in a fluid, flexible approach that you won't find described in management textbooks.
Table of Contents:
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
About the author:
Bob Frisch, managing partner of The Strategic Offsites Group, has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to German mittelstand family businesses to the U.S. Department of State. Bob's work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Fortune.
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