Top Ten

By Dominique Trempont, Guest Author

Why do strategies fail? How do CEOs ensure that things they want done get done?

Most of the time, strategies fail because they are not executed well. It is because there is a gap between what the CEO wants to achieve and the ability and priorities of his or her organization to execute.

I have seen organizations that seem incredibly busy and, yet, when you compare what the organization is busy with, it sometimes has very little to do with corporate strategy execution. Sometimes this is due to the fact that the strategy calls for a different DNA in the organization. Sometimes, it can be due to the wrong people in the wrong jobs. Sometimes, it is the result of unclear communication. Sometimes, organizations second guess the CEO and the strategy, and focus on what is, in their mind, the “right” stuff.

Whatever the cause, this is a symptom of cancer in a company.

How, to quote Scott McNealy, does a CEO “align the arrowheads”?

When I was at NeXT Software, we came up with a neat management system that we called the “Top Ten”.

The Top Ten Process starts from the top

Based on the strategy and the broad objectives of the company, each member of the executive team (ET) prepared a list of his or her Top Ten Deliverables that he or she was focused on. Each of us had such a list, including the CEO, Steve Jobs.

A deliverable was very concrete: win IBM as a partner, close the contract with AT&T for $10 million, release WebObjects 1.0 to 100 key customers.

A deliverable has a name assigned to it: in this case, it was an executive team member, one of us.

A deliverable had a deadline, a day associated with it.

Every ET members presented his/her Top Ten list to the entire ET. Each deliverable was scrutinized to make sure that the sum would deliver the objectives of the company in the right time. Many of these deliverables had critical interdependencies. For instance, the VP of Sales would commit to close a $10 million contract by June 30 and, for this to happen, heor she needed the VP of Engineering to release a new product four weeks before that, the VP of Professional Services to produce the prototype at AT&T in one week and the General Council to get the contract completed two weeks before the deadline. These interdependencies were highlighted, reviewed in detail and negotiated upfront. This lead to an intense discussion on what, how, who (resources) and by when.

Deploying the Top Ten process in the organization

Once the ET was satisfied that the Top Ten lists were solid, each executive would go through the same process with his or her direct reports.

These deliverables were often challenging to achieve and, sometimes, required organizational adjustments and listed key recruitments. They made it clear what was expected from the organization, who was accountable for what and what functional teams would be judged on, with a clear deliverable owner.

Each senior manager developed his/her own list and took it to its people.

Every single department of the company had its own list and each manager was accountable for meeting each deliverable.

Measuring progress

Every management review, including Board of Directors meetings, started with a Top Ten review.

Promotions, rewards and disciplinary actions were tightly linked to this process.

If it looked like a deliverable was in trouble, the executive in charge would raise a red flag and gather a team around him/her to figure out how to correct course.

Once a Top Ten deliverable was achieved, a new deliverable would take its place. Progress and every new deliverable would be reviewed at ET meetings.

Benefits

This process had the following impact on the organization:

* It guaranteed that the company was aligned in a very concrete way on execution of strategy and achievements of objectives. There was no gap.
* It emphasized teamwork. Teams were not abstract things: everybody was expected to deliver on his/her piece, no excuse. No time for politics.
* It ensured that we had the right people in the right teams. It became objectively clear who was pulling his weight and who was not.
* It gave top management a tool to assess if we had the right people in the right responsibilities.
* It got teams to communicate really crisply within themselves and with other parts of the organization.
* It stimulated natural coaching between experienced individuals and green talent.
* It created an execution machine that was time-based. You could dial in the velocity of the deliverables with more or less resources.
* It removed excuses and turned the dialogue to how do we deliver, as opposed to why we cannot deliver.
* It provided great visibility into progress, guided corrective actions and enabled us to forecast results quite accurately.
* It created a “lingua franca” for the organization, where everything is about execution, not excuses. It is scalable.

The alternative is chaos

Over time, I observed organizations that were not functioning in this model. Sometimes, the CEO is a heroic leader who either believes his or her own dreams and is systematically disappointed with an organization that does not meet his or her expectations. This creates frustration, burns out people. Nobody is sure why, since in theory, good people should perform, isn’t it? When such an alignment process is missing, it opens the door to politics (manipulation of reality), malaise, low morale and vulnerability.

A method that works

It just works. As far as I know, every NeXT executive who has been exposed to this process adopted it for the rest of their career and ran his or her organization in this model.

When I became CEO of Gemplus Corporation, we were breaking new software application grounds (Internet security and mobile internet applications that were not in the DNA of Gemplus). I immediately drove the organization with this process and quickly put an organization together that was capable of delivering what we wanted, when we wanted. Same thing when I became CEO of Kanisa: it drove a sense of urgency into a very talented organization.

This discipline is a foundation for great performance. It drives A players to excel, B players to deliver, and C players out of the organization. It applies to a start-up, to a company about to go public, to a multi-billion dollar multi-national company, and to non-profits.