Critical Factors in Implementing Requisite Organization

Speaker A Value leadership, what in the UK they call man management. If the CEO is simply interested in strategy or finance or technology, this is not for him, because this is a people intensive process. It's one that places its bets on leveraging the potential of many people, which means you've got to actively work to engage their commitment, to line their judgment, develop their capabilities. That's number one. Number two, as he and his team had experienced a day before, this is not a cakewalk. You can't be a little bit accountable anymore than you can be a little bit pregnant. And so one has to really value the rigor and be committed to applying it in a rigorous manner. The third is that, as with any system, it has to begin with the behavior of the CEO. The CEO has to walk the talk of setting context, of making sure accountabilities are ambitious, but achievable, of getting the right indirect and direct accountability set out for his team and the next level down. And fourth, the CEO has to be prepared to hold each of his subordinate executives accountable, not only for their personal effectiveness, but for their effectiveness as managers, namely for their subordinates outputs and effectiveness, and has to hold them accountable for holding their subordinate managers accountable because it is, again, a human process. And fifth, the CEO has to be willing to invest in the training, constructing the proper systems, going through the careful diagnostic phase, the modeling phase, and making sure the intention of that structure is well communicated and all actions are consistent with it. That has been, for me, my own personal guiding criteria. I would say one out of four potential clients that come to me, I reject because I don't believe that the CEO has at least three of those five capabilities or those attributes.