Navigation Plan for CEOs and Top Executives – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1058

Navigation Plan for CEOs and Top Executives – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1058

Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1058 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com for publishing your contributions here.

Credit: Rene Terp

Credit: Tima Miroshnichenko

Preamble

I am very impressed with the quality and range of work done by McKinsey &Co. The reports and articles generated by them are par excellence. They have published a great article in November last year in which they drilled down the learning taken from in-depth interviews of many of the most successful CEOs of current times and converted it into a checklist of 18 questions, of which every CEO should have the answers. These questions are spread across 6 dimensions. 

I would like to take this checklist and apply it to senior executives rather than CEO alone. In our pharma organizations, employee CEOs are not as powerful, rather, the authority is usually divided/ shared between the top executive layer. An added dimension is that the CEO job itself means differently in different organizations. CEOs may also have plenty of metrics to review, but checking their own course is not one of them. I would be referring to CEOs mostly, but all top executives can do similar things in their domains, at least, in Pakistan. The examples are all of CEOs because these are derived from the article.

This discussion could consume several articles, but in the interest of time and brevity, I shall wrap it up in two posts. The key information is taken from McKinsey article. Link at the end.

#1 – Direction Setting Checklist

• Vision – Do we have a clear and compelling vision that reframes what winning looks like, and is it owned by the whole enterprise?

It is not just about raising the aspiration level; it is about redefining what success means for that particular organization. For example, If Reed Hastings of Netflix had aimed at becoming the number one DVD company in America, the results would have much smaller and fragile and might have vanished due to changing market reality. Instead, he focused the company on becoming global entertainment company and we see where Netflix today is. 

For our pharma industry, the sales numbers game has taken over every other thing. No one, other than marketing and sales, relate to this vision. It is about time, that success is redefined in ways where most functions can relate with. 

Vision is a largely ignored area in Pakistan anyway. It is usually a combination of few words/sentences which sound good, though clichéd. Most interestingly, the vision might have been written by someone who wrote good English but did not have understanding about the company business.

• Strategy – Have we created a short list of clearly defined big moves at the enterprise level that will distance us from our competitors?

The best course is to focus on a short, but bold list of strategic moves during their tenure. These will vary with the industry type and environment but will be done with 25% more aggressively than competitors. When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, his short list of big moves was clear: double investment in the cloud, change the software business model from box to subscription, invest $50 billion in productivity and service acquisitions, sell the mobile phone business, and create a growth mindset. Today, Microsoft is one of the three most valuable companies in the world, with a market cap of over $3 trillion.

• Resource Allocation – Are we ‘thinking like an outsider’ to actively reallocate resources (money, people, management attention) to our highest priorities, even when it is hard to do?

Intel’s former president Andy Grove and former CEO Gordon Moore did so famously in the 1980s when the company’s share price was in a free fall. Grove asked Moore, “If we got kicked out, and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think they would do?” Moore answered, “They would get us out of memory chips.” Grove stared at him and said, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?” The rest is history, as Intel would go on to become the world’s most successful chipmaker for many years.

The highest performing companies shift most of their resources to business units, to generate more results. They would cut down in other areas to keep the priorities right. 

#2 – Organizational Alignment Checklist

• Culture – Are we targeting and systematically pursuing specific areas of cultural change to further execute our strategy?

Culture can be a great lever to improve performance, however, it is difficult to bring cultural change. People cannot be expected to change because the top management says so. Induction of corporate values even after huge investment of time and money, remain rather ineffective. Focusing on something else to bring change may be more effective. Paul O’Neill, former CEO of Alcoa, focused on creating a safety culture. His logic was straightforward: “I knew I had to transform Alcoa, but you cannot order people to change. That’s not how the brain works. So, I decided I was going to start by focusing on one things. If I could start disrupting habits around one thing, it would spread to the whole company.” And it did.

• Organizational Design – Is your organization characterized by a balance of stability and agility that maximizes the speed and effectiveness of execution?

Excellent top executives build flexibility into their domains’ design while maintaining strong cultural integrity. Companies that are both stable and agile are four times more likely to be high performing than those that are stable but lack agility.

Google’s Sundar Pichai employs a similar approach of assigning a team and leader who can bypass certain approvals and move faster than normal practices allow. “You need to design sanctioned ways by which people can break the structures you’ve set up,” he says.

• Talent – Are the most value-creating roles in our organization filled with the right talent, and do they have a strong leadership pipeline?

Knowing what roles in the organization create the most value and then putting the ‘best-fit’ talent there is the hallmark of great CEOs and executives. “You need to design sanctioned ways by which people can break the structures you’ve set up,” he says. All these positions would not be reporting to the top directly, but these must be treated exceptionally different from others.

Talent is in short supply. Finding, cultivating, and retaining talent is so important that it could mean the difference between success and failure.

To be Concluded…

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For most blogs, I research from several sources which are open to public. Their links are mentioned under references. There is no intent to infringe upon anyone’s copyrights. If, however, it happens unintentionally, I offer my sincere regrets.

Reference:

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-ceos-essential-checklist-questions-every-chief-executive-should-be-able-to-answer?cid=omcknsl-eml-nsl--mck-ext-----&hlkid=fb2a2860e9274f1aa6cbf144ba4f06ea&hctky=15999472&hdpid=112b4cf7-da5c-45ff-b566-4c16ad7f9654