The pandemic has definitively challenged the ordering of strategic priorities. Now businesses must quickly reboot, recover and reinvent themselves or just stay afloat. A rapid rethinking of everything, from re-examining business and reconsidering markets, to getting a handle on consumer behavioral changes and readapting, is required. It’s a lot.
Pivoting
Many CEOs have communicated their new visions and strategic aims, first and foremost by advancing their 3-5 year plans to prioritize the short-term. By way of example, Kevin Johnson, the CEO of Starbucks, made one of his strategic development initiatives, “on-the-go” service, a short-term priority. Otherwise said, CEOs now readily shift their strategic focus to the extent that this has become a part of the new normal within the duties and responsibilities of Management/Executive Committees.
But to redirect strategic focus that quickly, CEOs and their leadership teams now reinvent their team processes to maximize efficiencies. In fact, monthly informational meetings today include participatory decision-making sessions to boost leadership team proactivity as well as engage Management/Executive Committee members in rapid decision-making. What’s more, new follow-up and projection indicators ultimately strengthen CEO dashboards by monitoring implementation of these decisions to continually verify that it truly adheres to strategic objectives.
Management/Executive Committee Management Systems
Consequently, management teams in large companies now have “next gen” management systems to strengthen indicators and cohesion. Management/Executive Committee members, equipped with ever more information streaming through powerful KPI systems, smoothly assume their responsibilities. They efficiently oversee implementation with the benefit of new technological means to accelerate their decision-making. And when the collaborative excellence facilitates the steering of implementation, executive committee teams become much more can-do and agile.
CEOs Prefer Smooth Decision-Making and a Clear View of the Big Picture
These days, CEOs want tools that are customized to their management styles, and the means to make decisions more serenely and rapidly. In our ultra-agile world, upended by the unforeseeable, CEOs have decided to lead and execute their strategies differently: with so much precision that it might change their strategic priorities, hence their strategy as needed. CEOs now implement new technological solutions to steer efficiently the strategy execution.
KPIs and collaborative methods of top management, coupled via “next gen” management systems, are then solutions informing how strategy execution is steered, still very much the corporate Achilles’ heel.