Who's in the Room?: How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them (Hardcover)

Introduction: 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: TestingWalls 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