Everybody loves Bob. He’s a corporate hero. Just last week Bob was watching television after dinner, but he wasn’t really watching. Instead he was thinking about work, as he does most nights. Suddenly it hit Bob: he hadn’t checked to make sure engineering had included the new wiring diagram in the customer’s shipment that was due to go out first thing in the morning. Without the diagram the equipment would be useless.
“I don’t know what time I’ll be home,” he shouted to his wife as he bolted out the door, jumped into his car, and sped to the plant.
Jerry was on guard duty at the gate and greeted Bob warmly. He was accustomed to Bob showing up at all hours of the day and night. Bob went straight to the shipping dock. Sure enough, the box was sitting there ready to go, and it didn’t contain the wiring diagram. It took Bob an hour to track down a copy of the diagram, put it in the box, and reseal it for shipment. He got home at midnight.
That’s the kind of thing Bob does all the time. And the bosses recognize his devotion and applaud it often. He’s gotten raises and been promoted, and he’s been named Employee of the Month five times in the past two years. Many of his co- workers now emulate Bob and give an extra measure, too.
No doubt about it, Bob’s a great guy. Trouble is, his company’s approach to getting work done is a raging disaster.
Bob is forced to be a hero because he’s a loyal and ambitious employee struggling to overcome his company’s chaotic processes for getting things done. He gets lots of credit for making the fix to save the customer, but he’s constantly creating dramatic work-arounds because the existing processes create problems that shouldn’t exist. Worse still, Bob’s behavior and the accolades he receives simply reinforce the notion that everyone should work around the system. No one seems to grasp that if the system were fixed, there would be no need for heroes like Bob.
There are lots of companies like Bob’s, fragmented and inefficient. They survive despite themselves only because people like Bob are constantly fixing things. It may take thirty days to fill a customer order, but only three of those days involve real work. The rest of the time people are arguing about who’s responsible for some part of the order or the order is languishing in someone’s in- box.
For well over a century managers have achieved increasing productivity on ever larger scales by dividing and subdividing work into smaller and smaller units. The modern corporation that has evolved as a result consists of many specialized functional departments, such as sales, engineering, marketing, manufacturing, operations, and finance. The people who work in a given department all focus on the same departmental goal— advertising promotes sales, shipping moves the product, procurement buys the parts— and they report to the executive in charge of their department, who measures their performance and rewards or penalizes them according to the department’s own metrics.
Most companies get metrics all wrong. They allow each department to determine what it wants to measure. And because you get what you measure, each department gets a different and often uncoordinated result.
There is an alternative to the fragmented work process, and it allows us to be faster, cheaper, and better. It isn’t easy and it won’t happen overnight, but for those who master it the results are astounding.
The only way to survive in this ever-changing, expanding, globalizing economy is to continually adapt. Often this requires examining our processes from a macro-level. Getting a 50,000-foot picture of our operations illustrates outdated, cumbersome, inefficient processes. Rather than a series of discrete steps, work becomes an end- to- end continuum. People no longer focus entirely on their own jobs with no notion of how their work affects their colleagues’ ability to do their jobs or even the customer. Instead, they are thinking about the whole and not the parts, about outcomes instead of activities, about the collective rather than the individual.
About the Authors
Michael Hammer was a bold and revolutionary thinker, the coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation, the most important business book of the 1990s. Named to Time magazine’s first list of the twenty-five most influential Americans, the business world lost one of its rare geniuses when he passed away in September of 2008. Dr. Hammer was also the author of The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade as well as articles in the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, MIT Sloan Management and other publications. To read Michael’s complete biography, click here.
Lisa W. Hershman is the Chief Executive Officer of Hammer and Company. She is a seasoned business professional and author, who brings a wealth of real-world experience and an innovative style to her position at Hammer and Company. Lisa is the co-author of the business guide Faster Cheaper Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done (rated 8 out of 10 by Inc. Magazine) and an inspirational and sought-after speaker and conference moderator/leader both in the United States and internationally. She is a regular contributor to BusinessWeek and her columns have appeared in Forbes.com and Foxnews.com. She has appeared as a business expert on Fox Business News, the Jim Bohannon Show, the Ron Insana Show, and other nationally syndicated business radio programs.
https://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/william-stitt-196804-unsplash.jpg51843456StrategyDrivenhttps://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/SDELogo5-300x70-300x70.pngStrategyDriven2011-03-21 06:43:572018-06-12 22:49:22Everybody Loves Bob – Faster Cheaper Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done
“Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790) Founding Father of the United States and author and printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat
The conventional wisdom about strategy may be leading your company astray. In The Essential Advantage: How to Win with a Capabilities-Driven Strategy, Booz & Company’s Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi maintain that success in any market accrues to firms with a coherence premium – a tight match between their strategic direction and the capabilities that make them unique.
Achieving coherence requires a sharpness of focus that few companies have mastered. This book helps you identify your firm’s distinctive blend of strategic direction and differentiated capabilities that give you the ‘right to win’ in your chosen markets.
Based on extensive research and providing a wealth of exercises, tools, and company examples from many industries – including Amazon.com, Walmart, Pfizer, Inditex (Zara), Itaú Unibanco, and Procter & Gamble – The Essential Advantage helps you construct a strategically coherent company in which the pieces reinforce each other instead of working at cross-purposes.
Additional Insights… An Interview with Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi, authors of The Essential Advantage
SD: Why did you write The Essential Advantage?
PL and CM:Turbulent markets demand focus and discipline.
In this unpredictable economy, traditional approaches to strategy are a luxury most companies cannot afford. They cannot chart a future course based on a wide-eyed search for external growth: “There’s an attractive, adjacent market. Let’s go after it.” Rather, they need to conduct a clear-eyed assessment of what they as a firm already do exceptionally well, and then double down on those differentiating capabilities. Further, they need to limit their focus to, at most, six capabilities, and make those capabilities work together as a mutually reinforcing system that perpetuates competitive advantage.
SD: What is the ‘coherence premium?’
PL and CM:Coherent companies – those that possess a capabilities system that aligns their strategy with their product/service portfolio – generate superior performance over time, which is what we call the coherence premium.
For a company to be described as ‘coherent,’ according to our definition, it must be resolute and clear-minded in three critical ways: in the way the company creates value in the market (its chosen ‘way to play’); in the system of capabilities it deploys; and in the products and services it provides to its customers. The goal is balance: A coherent company strikes a balance where the right product and service portfolio naturally thrives within a capabilities system consciously chosen and implemented to support a deliberate strategy or way to play. We believe coherence confers a substantial premium, and we’ve measured it. We’ve established a strong correlation between coherence, as we define it, and superior performance over time in a number of industries.
SD: What does it mean to have a ‘right to win?’
PL and CM:The right to win is the confidence held by a company that its combination of way to play, system of capabilities, and products and services will outdeliver those of its competitors, drive sustained earnings growth, and thus give it an essential advantage in its market.
The right to win is the ability to enter or participate in any competitive market with the reasonably justified belief that you will succeed and create value. That belief stems from having chosen a differentiated way to play that is supported by a strong system of mutually reinforcing capabilities. A right to win isn’t a guarantee that things will go your way, but it reflects your relative coherence: the fact that you are better prepared to attract and keep customers than any of your competitors. A right to win can be measured in having share or margin advantage relative to competitors who compete within the same market.
SD: What is ‘capabilities-driven strategy?’
PL and CM:Capabilities-Driven Strategy (CDS) is a pragmatic series of choices designed to lead you to increasing levels of coherence and thus to gain an essential advantage for your company over time.
CDS starts with what you as a company do best – better than anyone else – and builds from that internal base of strength in making market participation choices. Traditionally, the practice of strategy has moved in the opposite direction. Companies scan the market for attractive expansion opportunities and build capabilities to suit those opportunities. We think they have it backward. It’s much harder to build capabilities than to leverage what you already do exceptionally well in capturing value. Those companies that focus on building a system of three to six best-in-class, interlocking capabilities that support their way to play achieve a right to win in their industries. They exploit their strengths over and over again, becoming even better at what they already excel at.
SD: What new ideas are you bringing to the table with capabilities-driven strategy?
PL and CM:Our take on capabilities and how they work in systems is new, as is our view of coherence as this three-part balanced system that confers a measurable premium.
While capabilities and competencies have been written about many times before, our firm’s perspective is that capabilities work together in systems and must be coherent with your way to play and the products and services you sell. Any one of these elements is not enough to gain the type of essential advantage that is sustainable over time. In addition, we believe that your starting point for strategy development is what you are already great at, rather than studying the industry and market for opportunities. This perspective is a shift from existing strategy perspectives as it affects nearly every major decision a company makes, from growth initiatives, portfolio strategy, and M&A opportunities to its approach to budgeting and cost cutting.
SD: Why now? Is it more important to consider capabilities when you develop a strategy now than it was, say, five years ago?
PL and CM:Economic downturns intensify the need for coherence and distinguish those who have achieved it.
CDS is not more important, but it’s certainly more timely, given the economic upheaval of the past couple of years. That creates an imperative for coherence. As a business, when you have a dramatic reduction in demand, you will be far less successful on the fringe. And you’re not going to be able to invest in those external market opportunities that traditional strategy would suggest. In a downturn, there is all the more reason to focus on what you already do well that your customers value and your competitors can’t beat. Finally, many industries are responding to the pressures of the last few years by differentiating themselves. The theoretical optimized industry is one with two or three players performing very different roles. Large downturns (such as this recession), technology disruptions, or regulatory shifts create discontinuities that simply accelerate the industry’s evolution toward this equilibrium state. The leading companies are getting out in front of this trend.
SD: It sounds logical to develop strategy by starting with one’s capabilities. What do most companies do instead?
PL and CM:Most companies look outside to adjacent markets for growth and invest in assets to exploit those opportunities.
The well-worn path to strategy in most industries is to seek growth outside your doors. You look at adjacent markets. You assess the attractiveness of the demand, the size and growth of the market, and the amount of profit that could be delivered, and you make participation choices and invest behind them. And, invariably, you invest in assets. You buy a company, invest in a brand, do R&D to meet that unmet need, expand into a new geography. These choices historically conferred advantage – first-mover, scale – but asset-based scale advantages have diminished in recent years, thanks to technology, cheap information, and outsourcing. Assets are important, but they are, increasingly, table stakes in most competitive industries; everyone in the game has them. Moreover, fixed assets are more difficult to leverage across diverse businesses than capabilities, and they tend to expire, become obsolete, or give way to related services. As the intrinsic value of assets diminishes, the competitive value of capabilities will only grow. In fact, we would assert that capabilities have already passed assets to become the primary means of creating value in most industries. They deserve at least equal weight in strategy setting.
SD: How does capabilities-driven strategy create value?
PL and CM:Capabilities-driven strategy creates value through four levers: effectiveness, focused investment, efficiency, and alignment.
First is an effectiveness benefit, which is realized simply in doing what you’re exceptionally good at over and over, day in and day out. Those companies that ‘sweat’ their capabilities continuously improve them and sustainably capture the top-line growth in their industries and, ultimately, market leadership. A coherent, focused, and aligned capabilities system creates not only value but a lock on value, as it is enormously difficult for competitors to replicate. Second, a coherent system focuses strategic investment on what matters. Coherent companies direct capital, time, and other resources with purpose to those activities, products, and businesses that will extend their lead. Third, there is the simple efficiency argument. Organizations that are clear-minded about where and how they participate in a market spend less on those capabilities that are not competitively differentiating. Finally, CDS forces alignment between strategic intent and day-to-day decision making. In a messy, incoherent world, those companies that can look through a capabilities lens set a straighter and more sustainable course and avoid costly missteps. These organizations move in lockstep, because everyone understands what’s important. They execute faster and with more force. And they attract, in turn, people who excel at the capabilities they wield with such mastery.
SD: Can you measure the success of a capabilities-driven strategy?
PL and CM:We have established a strong correlation between capabilities coherence and superior returns over time.
In fact, we have devised a way to measure the success of a capabilities-driven strategy and applied it to a number of industries. We call this measure the ‘coherence premium.’ To demonstrate it, we’ve examined a number of industries and mapped the level of capabilities coherence in the portfolio of each of the major players against their operating margins over the past five years. We have confirmed that coherence in capabilities correlates strongly with greater profitability (as measured by EBIT margin over a five-year period). Our approach to scoring coherence is similar across industries and can be distilled into three essential steps. First, we define the segments each company serves. Next, we identify the capabilities that drive value for the company in each segment. Finally, we determine the number of common capabilities across all the segments a company serves. The resulting score is then mapped against EBIT margin to determine the coherence premium. Our research shows that companies that invest mindfully in a capabilities system that supports their way to play and their product and service portfolio outperform the competition in their industry.
SD: Why haven’t more companies adopted capabilities-driven strategy as ‘the’ way to develop strategy?
PL and CM:It’s easier to accommodate incoherence than to fight for coherence.
Companies today operate in a business environment that encourages incoherence. Efforts to improve customer insight, for example, seem laudatory – but they can lead a business unit leader to propose bringing out a product line extension (‘Consumers are asking for it’) without considering how it fits with the company’s capabilities system. Or a benchmarking exercise might lead a functional leader to argue for new investment in distribution networks (‘Our competitors have them’ or ‘We must be great at this’) without recognizing that your existing distribution network, while it may not be the best, is more than adequate for your way to play, and the investment is better made elsewhere. It’s easier, or certainly less risky, to focus on incremental improvement in specific areas than sweeping change across the board.
What many people don’t realize is that CDS can be implemented at any level—function, business unit, subsidiary, enterprise. The complete coherence we’ve described is an ultimate destination, but there is also value created in the journey, in staking and exploiting ‘pockets’ of coherence. In an incoherent world, the relatively coherent company can prosper. In an incoherent company, the relatively coherent division can grow.
SD: Can you name some companies that have earned the coherence premium?
PL and CM:Walmart and Pfizer’s former consumer healthcare division are a couple of great case studies in capabilities coherence.
Walmart wrings maximum efficiency from its supply chain by integrating four capabilities – aggressive vendor management, expert point-of-sale data analytics, superior logistics, and rigorous working-capital management – that together deliver ‘everyday low prices’ to consumers. It’s a ‘sharp pencil’ capabilities system rooted in superior information. Because of its world-class point-of-sale analytics, Walmart can rigorously tailor its assortment to local consumption trends and go to vendors with better information than the vendors themselves have. This, in turn, increases the company’s leverage with suppliers and allows it to be extraordinarily efficient in moving inventory and managing working capital.
Pfizer’s consumer healthcare (PCH) division offers a great start-to-finish case study of capabilities-driven strategy development and the returns it affords. After absorbing the much larger consumer healthcare divisions of Warner-Lambert and Pharmacia in the early 2000s, PCH was looking to develop a focused growth strategy. Based on the breakthrough insight that consumer healthcare was more a healthcare business than a consumer products business, PCH restructured its entire business and product portfolio around six healthcare-oriented capabilities: pharma-like innovation, regulatory management, new product development, claims-based marketing, channel management, and the ‘Rx-to-OTC switch’ (adapting prescription pharmaceuticals into over-the-counter products). It divested a number of personal care and confectionary lines (e.g., Schick razors and Trident) and acquired other products (e.g., Purell) consistent with its chosen way to play. In 2006, Pfizer directly redeemed the value built by PCH by selling the business to Johnson & Johnson for an unprecedented US$16.6 billion, or 20.6 times EBITDA (compared to average multiples of 15 at the time).
SD: How can capabilities-driven strategy be applied to cutting costs?
PL and CM:CDS and cost reduction go hand in hand, as you need to make explicit choices about what to cut and what to keep.
In the course of developing and implementing a capabilities-driven strategy, companies make definitive choices about what matters and what doesn’t. They spend less on those capabilities that are not competitively differentiating. They don’t invest in making accounts payable world-class. They don’t fund R&D projects that won’t enhance their way to play. And they don’t overspend on marketing campaigns that won’t move the needle on sales.
Strangely, cost reduction exercises in most companies – no matter how extensive – are almost always divorced from business strategy, which makes little sense. You’re never just cutting costs. You’re making a decision that something is no longer strategically relevant, and that other things are essential. In coherent companies, every discretionary expenditure enhances a company’s capabilities system and thus strengthens its competitiveness.
SD: Does capabilities-driven strategy apply equally well to all industries and in all regions of the world?
PL and CM:We can’t imagine an industry or geography in which being good at what you do is not relevant or desirable.
The short answer is yes, CDS applies to all industries and all regions. Each company will come up with its own way to play based on its unique capabilities system – and in many cases, still, its advantaged assets. It’s true that different sectors and markets are at different stages of development and maturity. For example, in China, markets are still highly regulated, and domestic players protected. But even in such an environment, capabilities are essential – for example, working with the government to ensure distribution, or negotiating labor contracts to secure continued access to talent. Capabilities-driven strategy works in all contexts.
About the Authors
Paul Leinwand is a Booz & Company partner based in Chicago. He works in the consumer, media, and digital practice and focuses on capabilities-driven strategy for consumer products companies.
Cesare Mainardi is managing director of Booz & Company’s North American business and a member of the firm’s executive committee. He works with global Fortune 500 companies to help them achieve major business transformations.
To learn more about Capabilities-Driven Strategy, click here.
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You can’t turn on a television, open a paper or read a news feed today without hearing more depressing news about the economy. The crisis that started in the housing markets has unearthed a series of cascading consequences that few companies were prepared to handle.
How will this economic crisis play out? One possibility – every economist’s nightmare – is that we enter a depression. Another is that we wake up to reality, challenge the short-term profit demands of Wall Street, get strategic and build our businesses for sustainable growth.
Survive and thrive
In harsh economic times, the gut reaction of many companies is one of prudence and cost control: to take short-term actions that reassure shareholders and citizens. The biggest casualty of this type of reaction is often job loss.
Is cutting jobs the right thing to do? We do it because it’s quick and easy. Yet, the more jobs we cut, the more consumers fear for their future and stop spending. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: lack of spending leads to job cuts, leads to less spending – and so on.
Martha Rogers, co-founder of Peppers & Rogers Group, says, “This isn’t a financial crisis, but a crisis of trust.” She makes a good point.
Our actions don’t need to be all doom and gloom. While there’s no silver bullet, performance management philosophies suggest there are positive options before us. We already have the resources to survive and thrive. We just need to understand how to best deploy, grow or manage them.
If every organization has room to improve – perhaps even more than most realize – the first question we should ask is:
How do we get more out of what we already have without laying off? Start by focusing on three areas:
Cost reduction.
Productivity increases.
Innovation on a budget.
Cost reduction
Everyone is already reducing costs, right? Perhaps, but the better question is: Are we making smart reductions or further aggravating the problem?
In reality, most organizations are blind when it comes to cost. Peter Turney, President and CEO of Cost Technology, warns that many traditional cost-cutting exercises that companies are implementing right now could force their organizations into what he calls a “death spiral.”
Turney gives the example of outsourcing product assembly work. On a balance sheet, it may be clear that sending that work overseas is cheaper than doing it in-house, but when you look at the activity costs associated with returning products to the plant – including receiving, inventory and quality control costs – it may be more cost-effective to keep doing the assembly on-site. As this type of scenario plays out, it’s not uncommon to see further profit loss causing even more outsourcing in a continued effort to “reduce” costs – creating the spiral.
The same is true of customer profitability. All too often, those we think are our best customers – based on revenue – turn out to be our worst in terms of profit. If we decide to market our way out of the recession by attracting more of the same type of customers, we could be eroding profits further.
Turney’s point is that we tend to think about the cost of inputs and outputs and forget about the activities that support those outputs. Companies that can understand how individual processes are adding or destroying value can turn red balance sheets back into black.
What chunks of your revenue are profitable to your organization, and which are not? If you’re not applying activity-based management to your cost processes, you probably don’t know. To start reducing costs today, do an ongoing reassessment of which customers and products are building value in each quarter. The answers will point the way toward smart improvements and investments.
Productivity increases
Another obvious way to reduce costs is to increase productivity. Tor Dahl, economist and productivity expert, has been studying and helping organizations improve productivity for more than 30 years. He concentrates on removing what he calls “log jams”: things that sap energy, introduce inefficiency and create tension. Remove them, and it’s not unheard of to achieve 300 percent improvement in productivity.
“The only thing that creates new wealth in the economy is everyone being more productive than they were before,” says Dahl. “There is no other way.”
It’s ironic that so many leaders talk about employees being an organization’s best asset, yet the work force is the first thing that comes under attack when times are tough. Unfortunately, the employees who get laid off are often the same employees who know how to fix the organization’s problems. They’re simply stuck behind so much structure and politics that few feel empowered to make changes themselves.
Most employees don’t want to be unproductive. In fact, Dahl predicts that two-thirds of all stress and dissatisfaction at work comes from engaging in unproductive behavior. What can corporate leaders do to help everyone become more productive? Dahl suggests asking some simple questions:
What are you doing that no one in this company should be doing? Eliminate it.
What are you doing that should be done by somebody else? Delegate it.
The list goes on. With every answer and every solution, more time gets freed up. That extra time, along with the cost savings identified by Turney, can be used to focus on the third area: innovation.
Innovation on a budget
Carl Schramm, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, says, “The question of innovation is central to getting out of this recession.” When most of us think about innovation, however, we think of new products that take years and years to research and develop.
To make innovation more affordable and bring products to market more quickly, Joel Barker, “the paradigm man,” futurist and author, suggests “innovation at the verge,” which he defines as bringing two or more elements of difference together in such a way that they create something new. Examples include:
Time-share condos, which combined the ideas of renting hotels and owning a condo.
The combined forklift/scale, which makes package delivery companies more efficient.
What two (or more) elements could you bring together to solve problems where you work? The answers could involve combining two systems, processes or job descriptions – not necessarily two products or physical objects.
A positive view of the future
Everyone needs to do more with less, yet everyone complains they have insufficient resources – people, money and technology – to be effective. At the same time, profit warnings are forcing organizations to compound the issue by reducing staff, freezing budgets and delaying purchases of any kind.
A more positive view explores ways to cut costs and improve productivity without laying off or reducing budgets. We have given you three areas to focus on in this article. Watch the Webcast series below for more insights.
Our hope is that readers realize there are positive options. If we act on them and help reduce the ranks of the unemployed, confidence will return, consumers will begin to spend, and we may see a return to the growth and stability of markets and economies.
This article was republished with the permission of sascom Magazine.
About the Author
Jonathan Hornby, a Senior Marketing Manager at SAS, is a visionary and thought leader in the field of performance management. His experience comes from a hands-on background within the banking sector of the United Kingdom, followed by extensive travel, dialogue, and collaboration with customers, management consultants, and respected thought leaders around the world. To read Jonathan’s complete biography, click here.
StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.
The strength of our community grows with the additional insights brought by our expanding member base. Please consider rating us on iTunes by clicking here. Rating the StrategyDriven Podcast and providing your comments online improves our ranking and helps us attract new listeners which, in turn, helps us grow our community.
Thank you again for listening to the StrategyDriven Podcast!
About the Author
Steve Boehlke, author of 50 Lessons on Leading, is the principal architect and creator of Politics of CreativityTM, a distinctive and groundbreaking leadership framework that fosters creativity and innovation by helping leaders develop the needed political skills to address ‘taboo’ topics that inhibit innovation and undermine productivity. He is a frequent keynote speaker and facilitator at conferences and seminars worldwide. To read Steve’s complete biography, click here.
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Everybody loves Bob. He’s a corporate hero. Just last week Bob was watching television after dinner, but he wasn’t really watching. Instead he was thinking about work, as he does most nights. Suddenly it hit Bob: he hadn’t checked to make sure engineering had included the new wiring diagram in the customer’s shipment that was due to go out first thing in the morning. Without the diagram the equipment would be useless.
Michael Hammer was a bold and revolutionary thinker, the coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation, the most important business book of the 1990s. Named to Time magazine’s first list of the twenty-five most influential Americans, the business world lost one of its rare geniuses when he passed away in September of 2008. Dr. Hammer was also the author of The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade
as well as articles in the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, MIT Sloan Management and other publications. To read Michael’s complete biography, click here.
Lisa W. Hershman is the Chief Executive Officer of Hammer and Company. She is a seasoned business professional and author, who brings a wealth of real-world experience and an innovative style to her position at Hammer and Company. Lisa is the co-author of the business guide Faster Cheaper Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done
(rated 8 out of 10 by Inc. Magazine) and an inspirational and sought-after speaker and conference moderator/leader both in the United States and internationally. She is a regular contributor to BusinessWeek and her columns have appeared in Forbes.com and Foxnews.com. She has appeared as a business expert on Fox Business News, the Jim Bohannon Show, the Ron Insana Show, and other nationally syndicated business radio programs.
“Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”
Paul Leinwand is a Booz & Company partner based in Chicago. He works in the consumer, media, and digital practice and focuses on capabilities-driven strategy for consumer products companies.
Cesare Mainardi is managing director of Booz & Company’s North American business and a member of the firm’s executive committee. He works with global Fortune 500 companies to help them achieve major business transformations.
How to survive and thrive in a down economy
Jonathan Hornby, a Senior Marketing Manager at SAS, is a visionary and thought leader in the field of performance management. His experience comes from a hands-on background within the banking sector of the United Kingdom, followed by extensive travel, dialogue, and collaboration with customers, management consultants, and respected thought leaders around the world. To read Jonathan’s complete biography, 
StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.
, shares with us his leadership insights and experiences regarding:
Steve Boehlke, author of 
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