Description
Book SynopsisIs your company run by a team with no name?
At the top of every organization chart lies a myththat a Senior Management Team makes a company''s critical decisions. The reality is that critical decisions are typically made by the boss and a small group of confidantsa team with no nameoutside of formal processes. Meanwhile, other members of the management team wonder why they weren''t in the room or even consulted ahead of time. The dysfunction that results from this gap between myth and reality has led to years of unproductive team building exercises. The problems, Frisch shows, are ones of process and structure, not psychology.
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 portfolio of team
Trade Review
“Great guide for any leader to use in mapping out his or her advisory teams”
—800 CEO Read
“Authoritative and pragmatic look at how to make the right calls”
—Julian Birkinshaw, Management Today
“Offers real-world strategies for making the best of how organizations seem to work”
—The Leader Lab
“How to structure organizational teams in a way that is both more realistic and more productive is at the heart of Frisch’s book”
—CIO Magazine
“What you really want from a book on organizational decision making and leadership”
—New York Journal of Books
“You’ll know his advice is working when you see a dramatic drop-off in people coming into your office and asking, "Why wasn’t I in the room?"
—Matthew May, Amex OPEN Forum
“Who’s in the Room? falls in the great category…due to the book's ability to jar your perspective of how teams do and should operate.”
—Michael Wade, Execupundit
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 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: Testing Walls 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
