Typically, the right move is to do exactly what you’ve been doing, perhaps a little better. McKinsey can teach you all about digital transformation for a few million a quarter. Or BCG can help you decentralize after Bain’s shared services project caused all your favorite leaders to rage-quit. But sometimes, rarely, your move is to do something wild. Something that will be unpopular with nearly everyone. Something that does not have a middle way out; you’re either going to crash the plane or go into orbit. What does radical strategy look like? Who’s done it? Well, bringing Steve Jobs back to Apple and letting him cut away 40% of the company counts. Building an online streaming video company on top of a reasonably successful DVD delivery company is radical (though one should perhaps think harder about naming), as does turning an interlocking brick toy company into an entertainment company.
Again, it’s almost never the right time to do radical strategy. Mostly, pruning the people who advocate for radical strategy from your organization is the right move. Revolutionaries do not make an effective operation. But sometimes, and this message is exclusively for CEOs, the move is to change everything. It’s critical to change everything in a way that makes sense, however. To have an organization full of lions and tigers and come up with a new way of being that requires house cats is a terrible mistake. So the first step is to know your organization better than you do right this moment.
The next step is to find a reasonable narrative to fit your radical shift within. This must already be a way one could narrate your organization. If you run an organization that spends lots of time helping the people who buy things from you and these people feel that your organization cares about them, becoming a pure-tech thing is probably a terrible mistake (particularly because everyone is doing it).
The final step is to make it happen. Everyone above lower-middle-management in your hierarchy should be evaluated, and most of them must go. The winners of your organization’s political battle won their positions playing yesterday’s games, and the people who are most likely to be willing to play tomorrow’s game are either lower down in the ranks or not currently working in your organization. Your entire leadership team should hand in their resignations, second-term presidency-style, and you might select a couple of them to stay (but don’t feel like you have to). Only do this personnel shift once. And don’t let go anyone at the lowest level in your organization (whatever your new model, it should enable the people doing line work to stay; the morale, buyer relationship, and tactical benefits of this approach are enormous – do read a little Sun Tzu if you don’t believe).
At this point, you’re in a total commitment situation. You’ll have needed to prime your controlling stakeholders and continue to hold their hands delicately but firmly. But that’s been your job even before this radical strategy, so that ought to come naturally. And then it will either really work or really not. It’s better to have really gone for it, rather than having to listen to another consultant present yet another target operating model on yet another unbelievably fancy PowerPoint template.
Roman Ryan 