CEO & organization as cognates

made w/ midjourney

If you’re like me, the very phrase “strategic planning” gives you the willies. It conjures lengthy, directionless debates, often in the presence of an expensive facilitator/consultant. After all the talk and thin hotel coffee, you have a plan that may be laughably unrealistic, on one hand, or not so different from what you started with, on the other. Both of those are failures. 

A thought experiment that can focus your exec team is creating the annual scorecard for your CEO. Sometimes thinking about the future and goals of the whole organization can spiral you out too far. Thinking more narrowly and concretely about measuring the performance of the leader – that one person, making decisions and taking action inside of their one human body over the next 365 days of Earth time – can zap the cloudy, aimless future into a sharp, present picture.

You find quickly when you start on this that there are way more outcomes that one person is responsible for than they can reasonably own all alone. Of course. This is why there are other people on the team. The CEO will often be responsible for managing the people who more directly own and influence those outcomes.

-ben and eric