Michael Watkins’ First 90 Days

 

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers. If this is your first time, welcome and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. You’re about to listen to a career huddle where our flocking awesome community, CMO Huddles get exclusive access to the authors of some of the world’s best selling business books. Michael Watkins joins us to share insights from his book The First 90 Days. It was an unbelievable treat to be able to sit down and chat with Michael about a book that I believe is crucial reading for any CMO entering a new role. We’re looking forward to having Michael back on another bonus huddle in a few months to talk about his new book The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: I’m thrilled to be speaking with Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days. If you have not read this book, what are you waiting for? Michael is the founder of Genesis Advisors Group and the author of multiple books, including The First 90 Days, a Bible for professionals starting a new role. The first edition of The First 90 Days was published in 2003, jumped to the best seller list shortly thereafter, and since has been recognized as one of the top business books of all time. Now, a lot has changed in the last 21 years since Michael wrote the first edition, and even with the advent of AI and work from home and pandemic and all that, I would still argue every page of this book is pure gold. So having just reread it over the weekend—anyway, Michael, thank you so much for joining us. How are you and where are you this fine day?

Michael: Well, I’m delighted to be able to be with you, and I live just outside of Zurich in Switzerland, which is where I’m coming from today, but it’s a cold, you know, rainy day in Zurich, so I’m delighted to have the opportunity to bring a little conversational sunshine.

Drew: Awesome. All right. Well, thank you for spending part of your early evening with us. And just in case they have to leave early, or we need to convince them to stay, can you sort of, you know, all the years you’ve had living with this, give us three things executives typically get wrong when approaching their first 90 days, and then we’ll go through them one at a time.

Michael: So it’s interesting, you ask, right? Because the very, very first research I did on transitions back in the early Paleozoic Era, right? I also joke I was like in my late teens when I wrote the first edition of The First 90 Days. Yeah. So, yeah, anyway, was actually about common traps that leaders fall into, right? Because I think what interested me in the subject originally was really the fact that people seem to make the same mistakes over and over again, right? So that was coming from interviews I was doing and discussions I was having, and so I went in and did a research project on common traps into which new leaders fall. The most common trap, the biggest one is, you know, the What Got You Here Won’t Get You There Trap, right? So it’s Marshall Goldsmith’s, you know, cut on that particular issue. What I basically said about it at the time was expecting that what has made you successful in previous roles is going to make you successful in your new role. And it’s not that a lot of it isn’t still relevant. Much of it may be right, but you sometimes get these sort of break point transitions, you know, going to enterprise leadership as an example, becoming a manager for the first time as an example, right? Where there really are these big shifts in what you’re in, what you need to do to be successful. And so, you know, I always talk to my clients about, what’s the adaptive challenge you face, right? What’s the work you need to do to build the capabilities to be successful in this role. And what do you need to give up that you may love to do and be very good at doing? And what do you need to do more of that you may not be that great at or may not enjoy doing? You know? What do you need to let go of? What do you need to embrace? That’s kind of number one.

Drew: Yeah, that encompasses a lot. There’s so many thoughts that you know that we’ll get to later on, I guess. Before we go back to this first one, were there two others?

Michael: The second one is kind of related, although a little different, which is reaching conclusions too quickly about the nature of the problem and shifting too quickly from the learning and connecting to the deciding and acting process. And the third one, and again, these are all somewhat related to each other through so you know is, I call it the action imperative, right? The feeling that you need to take action to prove to them, whoever they are, right, that you’re, they made a good choice in putting you in the role that you’re, you know, blah, blah, blah, right? There are reasons why you have to make early calls and take early decisions, but you need to make sure that you’re not generating the impulse within you to do that because you feel like you need to prove yourself, or you’re feeling insecure in the role, whatever the reasons.

Drew: Awesome. Okay, so let’s go through these one at a time, because I do think that they are the crux of the issue. We support CMOs in transition through CMO Huddles, and we also have, obviously, a number of CMOs under the gun to start fast. And so this adaptive challenge of recognizing that you may need a different skill set for this job when, you know, for the most part, from a marketing standpoint, you know, they’re either building a marketing engine or they’re improving one. The bigger challenge, it seems to me, are often in the culture and in this area of assessing the problem. But I want to get at this just what got you here won’t get you there in the context of a marketer.

Michael: Yep. So it’s a good question, right? And the things you just mentioned also, you know, culture, you know, are also important, especially when you’re onboarding, and I’d love to talk about that, and going into the new org. So the example I used Drew is, really, I think what’s applicable here would be becoming a CMO, right? And what it means to step up to being on a leadership team, maybe for the first time. And I do a lot of work personally, both you know, through Genesis Advisors, my consulting company, but also the programs I teach at IMD Business School on stepping up to enterprise leadership, and what it means to be an enterprise leader, and how you really need to shift from being more of a specialist. And, I mean, you know, CMO is not exactly a specialist, but you’re very obviously marketing focused to really, you know, being able to talk and focus and lead across the enterprise as a whole, right? And what does that mean, you know, to be a member of an executive team to be effective? I talk about wearing the two hats, right, of representing your function, in this case, marketing effectively, but also being able to take the enterprise-wide perspective. I think there’s pieces as you go to more senior levels that are a lot more about building alliances internally and externally. Your focus often shifts more to the outside as you go to senior levels. So I put that one up there. I talk a little bit sometimes about what it means to go from being a problem solver to an agenda setter, right? You’re now responsible for setting the agenda for the organization as a whole. And a lot of this, by the way, comes out of an article I wrote, which is not in The First 90 Days, about the seven big shifts as you move to enterprise leadership. It’s a HBR article I wrote called How Managers Become Leaders. But it’s pretty clear that that move to, you know, being on an executive team, on a leadership team, is a very large move. The other one, I mean, it’s not so relevant for you folks, unless you’re planning to become CEOs, which maybe some of you are. Becoming a CEO for the first time. It’s a really, really big leap, and I love working with first-time seniors.

Drew: So, so many things to unpack here. We had a big conference last Friday, and Liz Weissman joined us. And I’m not sure if you’re familiar with her work Multipliers and Impact Players, but she talked a lot about this topic of a leader first, a functional person second, and I think that’s particularly hard for marketers, because they are really good at identifying what the marketing problem is and solving the marketing problem, but at that moment when you make the shift and become a business person versus a marketer, is a huge moment. I want to go back to getting to the conclusion too quickly, and this, I’ve seen a lot, and I’m going to set this scenario for you. So CMOs, you know, if three years is a common tenure, you know, the one either leaves or is asked to leave, a new one comes in. There’s this presumption that everything was done before was wrong, so we got to fix it. That usually means we got to fix the website, we got to fix the brand, we got to fix the story. And often, these projects get initiated in the first 90 days, when in fact, there might have been another problem, like a product problem or a service problem. So how do you sort of manage this rush, yeah, the action imperative and making sure you’re solving the right problem.

Michael: The word that comes to mind immediately is maturity. You know, there is this understandable desire to, kind of, in quotes, put your stamp on things. And you know, but there is this also tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water, and you. You know, I think the fact that people are on three year cycles actually doesn’t serve organizations particularly well, right? Guy, I used to joke that the key is to move faster than your mistakes show up, you know, kind of like a stone skipping across the water. As long as you keep sufficient forward velocity, right? The skipping continues. I mean, I’m joking, obviously, right. But look, I think that, you know, I guarantee you that there’s no organization so dismal that they haven’t done something right. And often there’s a lot of good things right. And I think that you know, if you’re being mature as a leader about this, and really genuinely committed to having an impact in building momentum, you want to be very thoughtful early about discerning what is, what is good and worthy of being preserved and what needs to change right. And that means a lot of attention to the early diagnostic and connection processes that I think are the engine of every successful transition, and not sure changing them and and then that connects to some things that I write about in the first 90 days, which is, how do you speed up the learning process? Because the faster you get up to speed in the in the new role, the better. How do you accelerate the process of connecting and building alliances? Because that buys you the time to begin to have an impact. But there’s a little there’s a little triangle I use sometimes, you know, that’s, you know, learning and connecting, deciding and acting, reflecting and planning, right? You can imagine the three things, right? And there’s a tendency to move very quickly to, you know, deciding and acting, and not spend enough time on the learning and connecting, and forget about it for the reflecting, you know, piece of it, right? And so just slowing yourself down maybe a little bit. And don’t get me wrong, I have clients. I’m sure you do too, where they have to make really tough early calls. The situation demands that you’ve got to do something. But as often I see people that feel impelled to do things when they really could have taken a little bit more time.

Drew: Well, I think it comes back to what you said earlier. This is a problem they’ve solved. They know how to solve it. Oh, we have a brand problem. Okay, well, let’s fix that. And the truth, it’s rarely a brand problem in the sense that it’s a design or a color thing. There may be a reputation issue, there may be an awareness issue, but it’s not, you know, new logo, new design, new coat of paint. It’s something bigger, but if they’ve done the rebranding, it’s like, Oh, great. Or similarly, the new website. So again, we get to this question of, there is an action imperative we talk a lot about, you know, we have this thing called a quick wins checklist, three pages long, of things that CMOs can do that are quick fixes. But the notion is to buy time, right, absolutely. And build a little credibility. And I wonder how much time folks go into in terms of seeing the alliances in the first 90 days as being so important. Why are building those so important? And again, this is the context of marketing, marketing officers.

Michael: So I guess there’s, there’s a couple things that come to mind immediately Drew when you said this, right? One is the old Mark Twain saying, you know, to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? There is a tendency to to, you know, come into organizations and see the problems you want to see, because you know how to solve them, right? And that’s really dangerous to do that. I think the second point about early wins is a really good one that you’re making. I interviewed the then CEO of CBS years ago, and you know about how he sort of creates momentum when he comes into a new organization. And he says he always, he would always pick a few really easy, not very consequential things to focus on, right? Because he wanted to convey the impression that he was decisive, but had decided not to decide yet on some key issues, right? So that, I thought, was always very connected, I think, to exactly what you’re saying, right? And by the way, that points to the critical importance of building momentum. Right? Right? Transitions are momentum games ultimately, and the question is always, how are you going to create momentum? I focus a lot when I talk about leadership these days on energy right? The core of leadership is about mobilizing and focusing and sustaining the energy of the organization, right? And momentum plays a critical role in your ability to do that. You also got me thinking a little. Drew about culture, right? The other thing I think people miss sometimes is that culture matters, right? The way you get things done in organization, even if you think you’ve got the right technical solution to a problem, it doesn’t mean you can implement it successfully in an organization. Because of the culture of the org and the capacity of the culture to absorb change is something that I think people sometimes underestimate its importance For sure.

Drew: It’s so funny as you’re as you’re talking, I’m thinking of a quote I wrote a an article on, oh, here comes the CMO. They’re always trying to do too much, too fast and and the truth is, like. In a Silicon Valley company where the culture is fail fast, that’s fine, but a lot of companies and so that’s where this culture factor

Michael: As it connects to the point your point you’re making about alliances too, right? You know, I mean, if you’re really going to have an impact in an organization, you need to be very clear about whose support is make or break for you, right? You know, if you’re doing you know, digital transformation, then you know, obviously the Chief Digital Officer or the chief information officer are going to be critical allies for what you’re trying to do. Are you forging those alliances? Are you clear about whose support is make or break for you, right? And there is this tendency to focus on the technical and not the cultural and political as much as you need to.

Drew: Right? Because the technical we can just plug something in, take something out, doesn’t seem like there’s going to be that much resistance. One of the points you make later in the book, that really just hit me in this first 90 days is whatever the things that you decide to take action on they better be the priorities of your CEO, right? And I just, and in theory, you know, the single most important determinant of a CMO success is their alignment with the CEO.

Michael: It’s a, it’s a big duh, right? At some level, right? Which you know, for anyone taking a new role, getting early wins that matter to your new boss. That’s kind of, yeah, absolutely you should be doing that. Yeah. Now there’s also, though, this interesting piece that I know you’ll resonate to right, which is, what happens if your CEO is really not right about what needs to happen or hasn’t diagnosed the situation accurately. And you know, your job is to kind of, you know, move their mind in the right direction, right? It’s not just being a taker of the, you know, instruction set for the org. It’s how do you really negotiate success? I call it right in the in the book, because sometimes, you know, they don’t have a full view of what’s going on. And, you know, some maybe, they say, look, marketing is a complete disaster. Drew go in and, you know, do radical surgery, you know, to a, you know, do violence to the organization. And you find, actually, there’s some decent people that just haven’t been led well, and some reasonable capability, or, you know, you’re there, you need to, kind of, you know, realign what’s going on. You get it in it’s a complete disaster in progress, right? And you have to So, so there’s this whole process that I think is really critical about gaining alignment around expectations resources. You know, what is success fundamentally going to going to look like?

Drew: Well, and that’s probably so that the situation that you’re describing felt so real and visceral to me, and it happens a lot is okay. So the CEO says, here’s the problem, and the CMO has a choice. They can either take that at face value and go try to solve for that, or they can do their homework and say you’re part right, and or ultimately find out they’re completely wrong. And in that spectrum lies some challenges.

Michael: Absolutely but that’s also where alliances become very important, right? Because, you know, I mean, again, I have my little aphorisms about this Drew and one is, you never want to be the sole source of pain in an organization, right? You never want to be the one that’s the to be the sole source of pain in an organization, right? You never want to be the one that’s the sole source of discomfort. You want to syndicate. So it gets again to how you educate, how you build alliances. So it’s not just you telling the CEO you know that it needs to go this way. It’s you and the COO and the CFO, so aligned around, you know what needs to happen, right?

Drew: Well, and I think that in that particular case, it’s marketing and the salesperson and it’s marketing in the CFO, because between those two, you’ve covered, unless it’s an HR issue. But I love that you don’t want to be the sole source of pain. So it’s funny, we did. This came up in a huddle, literally yesterday, and the CEO has rushed a new product out to market. The market wasn’t ready for it, and now the CEO wants to meet every day. This is not a first 90 days problem, but it could be.

Michael: It absolutely could be, right, but it’s, but it is a form of transition problem, right? And you’ve got to, you’ve got to think about how to lead through that particular crisis, basically, right? But crisis is a form of transition driven. Many of the principles are applicable, right? How are you going to get some really wins, right? How are you going to begin to build momentum in the direction of a solution to that particular issue? I think is, uh, it’s undoubtedly a bias on my part, but I think you know, everything important happens in 90 day increments through right? There is no other you know duration of time that’s relevant. That’s a joke, obviously, right? But, but in a crisis, thinking about what’s our next 90 day plan, right? Is not a bad way to think about what you’re doing.

Drew: Right? But I’m even thinking. That situation that we just described, had that individual been able to go to a product person and sales person and maybe a customer service person and said, Here’s the thing, this thing isn’t sticking any thoughts. Can we come together to help the CEO understand it? The 90 day increment is so interesting in business to business because sales cycles are used. Maybe, if they were six to nine months a year two years ago, they’re now 12 to 18 months. And so not a sale does not happen in 90 days. The beginning of something that can help solve a problem, that will help you get to a sale can happen. And so you have this lagging success. You know, we implement something today, and we feel that success a year ago, where that sort of messes with my mind and your framework of 90 days.

Michael: Well, let me push you back on that a little bit, right? So I’ve been working lately on a version of this that is about managing your organization on 90-day cycles, basically, right? And we moved personally to that system in our own consulting company, Genesis, right? We now do everything on a 90-day sprint cycle, right? So we adapted some of the Agile principles, not the whole Agile implementation, but the idea of doing things on a 90-day basis and combining it with OKRs, right? Objectives and key results and key initiatives. And you know, sprint drivers for key initiatives. And you know, if you think about it that way, right, you’re basically running things and adapting things on a 90-day to 90-day, quarter-to-quarter basis, right? And that’s an incredibly powerful thing to do right now. You know, you’re not going to accomplish all you want in a single 90-day sprint, right? But you’re going to make enough progress, and then you’re going to reset, redo, think about the next one, right? We personally found that by doing it on a 90-day momentum cycle like this, we’ve really energized the organization. And we did this because annual planning just was not cutting it for us anymore. Things were changing too fast, right? The environment was too turbulent, right? And so I sat down with my team and we started brainstorming, saying, “Well, you know, isn’t every quarter the next 90 days? And couldn’t we apply some of the principles of this to really start to accelerate our responsiveness as an organization?” And it’s worked extremely well. And I actually have written an article recently. It’s up on LinkedIn, on my newsletter on LinkedIn, Leading Edge. That’s about the momentum process, if folks are interested.

Drew: It sounds a little bit like EOS, Entrepreneurs Operating System. And the great thing about that is, from a management standpoint, teams can sort of relate to 90 days. We got this, we got our rocks. If we are all focused on that, it makes sense.

Michael: Traction also, if you like the Traction system, there’s different, there’s different. You’re right, yeah. I mean, for us, we’ve created something, I think it’s fairly simple, right? It’s organized around OKRs, and we use a sort of, you know, responsibility accountability matrix, and we think about key initiatives and who’s driving key initiatives. And so it’s a kind of a simplified version, but again, I don’t want to get off track, but if folks are interested, if you go to my LinkedIn section, you’ll find those implemented.

Drew: We’ll include those in the show notes, and get those off to the community. I want to go back to it feels like everything comes down to this assessment period where you’re making sure you’re not solving the problems you know how to solve, but solving the problems that matter to the organization, that are going to have a meaningful impact on it. And yet, over and over again, you know from your research that this doesn’t happen.

Michael: So I guess I think I challenged that a little bit, right? I think that folks have gotten somewhat better at doing this, and I think I’ve had an impact in terms of that, right? I think I’ve had a positive impact in emphasizing the importance of being able to do that early assessment. I think part of the reason why I’ve had an impact, though, is I’ve convinced people that they can actually do it fairly quickly, you know, so if you focus on, you know, accelerated learning, accelerated connecting, and then you can kind of convince people, I think, that it’s okay to spend some time doing that, right? It’s kind of a little bit of a parlor trick, I guess, right, to do that, but it does seem to work. You know, the other thing I’ve tried to do too on this, which I think is working, and I’ve got an article that hopefully looks like it’s going to come out in the March-April issue of Harvard Business Review, is about what you do in the next 90 days. So I’ve written a ton about the first 90 days, obviously, right? But very little has been written about, okay, now what? Right? The truth is, and it doesn’t happen exactly at 90 days, obviously. There really is a mode shift from something that looks a lot more like learning and connecting and diagnosing and, you know, obviously, not only because there’s decisions you need to make, right? To a much more active kind of mode. And you know, for the sake of explanation, I’ve set it up as kind of the first 90 days, the next 90 days. The reality is, you know, it’s never, it’s never that clean, and it never happens precisely on a 90-day mark, right? But you know, as an example, you know, for your vision and strategy, often you’re coming in, you’re reviewing the financials, you’re viewing the strategies, you’re evaluating the current strategy and its alignment. But then at some point, you’re defining what your new strategy and vision is going to be, which hopefully, as you go with your point earlier, is not a completely brand new throw everything away, you know, but you’re shifting. You’re shifting in the direction of putting some stakes in the ground. You’re shifting in the direction of making some key decisions. You’re shifting in terms of now aligning stakeholders around the direction that you want to go. And I, you know, I sort of look at those kinds of dimensions, right? Your vision, your strategy, what changes your stakeholders? What changes the team? Work you do? Right? A lot of the early work you do, you know, with your team is very much assessment and planning oriented, right? I mean, when I work with my clients, a lot of the time we spend up front is really around team assessment, but also putting together a team evolution plan, right? How are you going to evolve this team to be the team that you need it to be?

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Drew: I want to plant a seed for I know a number of the folks that are listening right now on the call you’ve implemented the first 90 days, I want you to think about a challenge that you’ve run into in that 90 days. And if you come up with a question, I hit this roadblock, I would love to have you come on and ask Michael the question while you’re thinking about that. And then I’ll know you’re doing it, because you’ll raise your hand virtually. But one of the things, look everybody does SWOTs. It’s such a nice, little, easy formula, there are folks who argue that they are ridiculous tools because they’re based on somebody’s perspective. They’re not scientific, that they often are misleading. But you have one interesting perspective on that is, we got to switch we’re starting backwards. Talk about SWOT vs TOWS.

Michael: Yeah, sure, TOWS, TOWS. So look, you know, the original tool in a SWOT came out of, you know, Stanford in the 60s. And originally they used SWOT and TOWS interchangeably, right? But they converged. It’s kind of conventional usage, converged on SWOT, I think because it sounds cool and TOWS sounds like you’re playing with your feet. And so I think that’s my theory about why it worked that way. But better, you know, when I started using the tool, and by the way, I, you know, it is a simple tool, but if you think it’s not a helpful tool, you’re missing the point about what you’re trying to do, right? What you’re trying to do with many of these things is gain alignment around the situation, right? When I work with, you know, the teams I work with, one of the first things I focus on is, do you have a shared view of reality, right? Are you fundamentally on the same page about reality, or are there divergent views of reality, or are you engaged collectively in magical thinking? Right? You’ve kind of gone off into a, you know, some weird place where lambs lie down with lions and goodness and niceness, you know, prevails in the world, right? But this whole thing about, if you don’t have a shared view of reality as a leadership team, you’re not in a good place from the get-go, right? Using SWOT or TOWS or some version of it is a great way to just sort of pressure test, right? Quickly, very quickly. Are we on the same page, right? And so when I use it with leadership teams, I set it up as a little survey on Survey Monkey, you know, what are the biggest strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and then I compile it and I feed it back, you know? And so here’s where you’re in agreement, here’s where you’re not. That typically generates a great alignment conversation that then can take folks forward, right? And that, to me, is the key, the key point of it, right? SWOT versus TOWS. You know, the reason I go with the TOWS, as much as it sounds super funny, and you know, we all should be playing with our TOWS, I guess, is that, I think it helps to start by looking externally and saying, “What are the biggest threats and opportunities that we see in the environment, right?” So shift the focus to the outside first, and then say, “Okay, given those threats and opportunities, what are our strengths and weaknesses, right?” You know, I started doing this through, you know, many years ago, when I was working with teams, because I found that if you ask teams, what’s the organization’s strengths, what’s its weaknesses, you got this very abstract, kind of unfocused, lightly so far, kind of conversation, right? Whereas, if you focus initially on the outside environment and threats and opportunities, you got a very focused conversation about how people were seeing things. That’s why I used that’s why I sort of went the direction I did with this. I should say too, you know, one of the frameworks in the book that I think folks have resonated quite a lot with is the STARS framework, right? For startup, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, sustaining success, as a way of diagnosing the kinds of challenges or the mixture up against. It’s also a great little framework to pressure test whether your team is on the same page in terms of reality, right? You know, you see something as a turnaround, I see it as a realignment. Someone else sees it as accelerating growth. Well, why, you know, and how do we gain alignment on the core of what the nature of the change challenge is that we’re faced with? And so just a couple of simple tools like this can very quickly help you pressure test the degree of alignment on the team about reality. And that’s, you know, I find valuable.

Drew: Yeah, I want to go back to something because I thought there’s just such an interesting idea. And I’ve never actually heard a CMO talk about it this way, which is this notion of getting to break even quickly, talk a little bit about that again. So I mean, CMO comes in and they’re supposed to, there’s, there is. I love the term magical thinking, because there is a lot of magical thinking, from a CEO to a CMO, it’s like, I gave you two cents. Now, turn that into a billion dollars in revenue, right? You have no resources and no thing. Off you go. But that aside, just this simple notion of, sure, you well, you know, getting to break even.

Michael: So, so the idea of the break-even point, by the way, and that’s not the same as breaking the organization, right? That’s not what we’re talking about, right? It’s a metaphor, right? It’s financial break even, right? How quickly are we going to reach a point where we see a net return to the work we’re doing? Right? I mean, I used it as a way up front in the book, to kind of illustrate the value of accelerating the learning process and beginning to take action that has an impact, right? The idea is basically unaided. It may take you six months before, and again, my little joke through it. You know, six months before you haven’t done damage to the organization anymore, right? Where you’ve created some net, net value for the organization, right? And if you can condense that, if you can get to the break-even point in three months, you’ve gained a huge amount of time. You’ve gained the ability to do value creation, because that’s what you’re there to do. Fundamentally, you’re there to create value, you know, I again, you know, don’t want to get off in tangents, but I’ve been writing stuff lately about leader amplification systems. Right? How do you put in place a system that amplifies your impact as a leader? And that’s your team, but it’s also your support system. It’s your advisors, it’s analytics. You know, there’s a bunch of different pillars to it, but it all begins with, what’s your unique value driving proposition? Right? What are you uniquely able to do to create value for the org? And if you connect that to the break-even point, right? It’s, it’s basically, how are you going to realize, you know, the potential of that value driving proposition as rapidly as possible?

Drew: There’s so many questions that I have for you. I’m just going to use a I give a quote here that I just hope the CMOs will write this down. The question that you can ask every single department head that you go is, “If you were me, what would you focus your attention on?” Yep, That is such a killer question.

Michael: It’s part of a set of questions Drew, so sorry again. I think you’re hitting really interesting stuff, right? How do you speed up the process of learning about a team, right? I mean, that the question you just gave comes from the chapter about building the team, and it comes from the section in that chapter about, how do you speed up the process of assessing a team, yeah. And a very simple thing you can do is ask every member of your team a few basic questions, the same basic questions, right? A set of template of questions, right? You know, what do you see as our biggest threats? What do they see as our biggest opportunities? What are the resources we have that we could leverage more than we are today? And then that question, right, which is, if you were me, what would you be focusing on? And I get my clients to sort of do those, you know, interviews, basically of the top of their teams using a standard question template. We often customize it to a degree for the situation. And you very quickly get a sense of, again, how much alignment is there in the team, right? And you also begin to get a sense very quickly of the people on the team. And you very quickly get a sense of is there volunteering information, or is he withholding information, or is he pointing fingers subtly somewhere else? You know that there’s a lot of sort of two level, you know, learning that goes on when you do this, you know. But the key is, is to really begin to mobilize people, right and to and to get them feeling energized about what’s going on these days.

Drew: It’s quite common for companies that you interview with at the CMO level to ask you for your 30-60-90 day plan. And they ask and they want you to come and present it. And yet we have this conflict that we’ve already described, and I have a quote from you which is perhaps the most destructive of all. Some new leaders arrive with the answer, right? So we have this.

Michael: So I really hope that when people do that, they don’t think they’re going to provide answers, right, or they’re going to provide definitive diagnosis, right? What they should be providing is a process of engagement. They should be saying, here’s how I’m going to come in, here’s who I’m going to talk to, here’s how I’m going to accelerate my learning process. Here’s how I’m going to build alliances, right? Here’s how I’m going to make sure I’m aligned with you, you know, Mr. CEO, here’s when I’m going to come to you, you know, with an assessment and a plan. Here’s when we’re going to figure out, you know, how to, how to move forward with things, because, you know, those 90 day plans when you’re asked for it before you’re even in, the thing should mostly be about the process you’re going to use, and not about the substance of what you’re going to be doing, because you have no clue, really, in the end, exactly what you’re going to be doing, right? And you just look like a bit of an idiot if you say, in month three, I will, you know, decimate, you know, the branding department, yeah.

Drew: Yeah, if you start to put actions, I think what’s interesting, I have seen some CMOs do this with success. They say, “Oh, you want a 30-60-90, great. I need to interview every single member of the executive team.” And in that process, they end up developing some hypotheses. And then when they can present the 30-60-90 say, “Here are some hypotheses. I don’t know if these are right or not, but I want to use the first 30-60-90 to sort of, you know, these are part of my investigative and learning to help put together a plan. How’s that sound?”

Michael: Well, so you’re on to something I think really interesting and important, right? Which is the power of process and the power of process leadership. You know, I think when you’re putting together those hypothetical 90 day plans, they mostly, as I say, should focus on the process of engagement, decision making, focus, you know, alignment that you’re going to pursue, right going forward, because you have no clue at this point. I mean, you may have, by the way, you may have hypotheses, right? I mean, that that’s fair ball, if you know enough about the org, right? It’s fair ball to come in and say, “Here’s a few hypotheses I have about what’s going on, but I would be testing those hypotheses, right?” And that, you know that depends on the degree to which you understand the organization you’re coming into, right? But there’s also a whole piece through about you can do a lot by structuring the process for your team, even if you really don’t know the organization that well, or you don’t know the substance of the situation that well, right? Just by virtue of taking the team through a process of shared diagnosis, right? And framing and solving problems. So I describe this as the power of process leadership, right? And frankly, you can, you know, you almost don’t need to know anything about the organization to be able to do that. If you have mastery of process leadership, it takes you a long, a long way. Yeah, if that makes sense.

Drew: It does. I wonder how many people would just say, you know, what’s my first 30-60-90 here, that’s this. Is it? This is it. Have you read it, if not…

Michael: I’m gonna give you a commission, Drew.

Drew: Please. Thank you. Paul Lacey from San Francisco, Paul, what’s your question?

Paul: Hey, Michael, by the way, great book. Thank you. I’ve used it on multiple occasions, and it’s just been game changing. But my question is about right now a lot of companies are experiencing a lot of rapid change, so speaking about process leadership, you know, a lot of us will come into an organization, and oftentimes, within the first 30 to 60 days, I’ve experienced this, the goal posts change. So you know, if you design your entire process around, let’s say, a particular go to market motion, and the CEO decrees, we’re not going to do that anymore. We’re going to do something completely different that would obviously change the way that you would have gone through your interview process and your hypotheses. So does that mean that you should change or go back to the beginning and restart the process? How would that work?

Michael: So I wouldn’t say you have to go right back to the beginning, Paul, but I think you do need to do a reset in a situation like that. I think that that would be a moment where I’d be looking at, what should I be doing regardless of what’s going on, what foundations do I need to put in place, what capabilities do I need to build? And then I’d be looking at, okay, given the shift, what’s the pieces that I need to kind of do a reset on? But I think I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t assume everything needs to change. I wouldn’t assume that there’s big pieces of what you’re doing that can’t continue. I think it would be, I’d want you to be clear about which category those things are in, you know, you may have a fundamental marketing capability that just isn’t there, and regardless of what the decision is about, you know, the particular go to market strategy, that capability needs to be built. Okay, let’s proceed with building that capability, right? But okay, on this piece, we’re a bit back to the drawing board, and that’s okay, you know, now, for the pieces, you go back to the drawing board on, I’d be really clear again, you know, here’s the process we’re going to use to do that, right? We’re not just going to, you know, snap our fingers and magically pivot, you know, 180 degrees, right? We’ve got to go through a process to get there, and then when it gets really complicated. I think it’s it’s changing so fast again and again and again that you’re never catching up, in which case, you know, I think you want to run away screaming from the organization. I’m joking, Paul, but not you know, if it’s really shifting that fast, there’s a deeper problem, probably.

Drew: JD Dillon of Tygo energy. JD, what’s your question?

JD: Hello Michael, so let’s say you’re inside the same company. You’ve been there for quite some time. So you’ve been there five or six years, and somebody says, hey, Lakshmi, I know you’re in marketing. You need to take over product. Often it’s because it’s broken. It’s known. The expectation for action is a lot shorter, and your knowledge should be higher, the process probably remains the same, but accelerated. Or what do you think?

Michael: So, first of all, I just want to. I want to, I’m smiling at the idea that being in an organization for five or six years is a long time. JD, you know, it’s kind of, it’s emblematic of the days we live in, right? That that you make that statement, right? So look, I think what you’re pointing to, and it’s really a great point, right? Is, is, you know, if there’s precision about the definition of the problem, and there’s capability to move rapidly to solve the problem, then go for it, right? There’s no reason to kind of delay when that’s the case, right? It’s more when it’s not so clear what the problem is, or there isn’t alignment around what the problem is, or it requires a new set of capabilities to be built to solve the problem, but no full speed ahead, if that’s the situation you’re in, as long as you’re pretty confident that’s what’s going on, right, and not assuming that that’s what’s going on and what’s reality is actually something a little bit different, but it’s a great, it’s a great example.

JD: Great. Thank you.

Drew: Have so many quotes I just have to squeeze in here one, and we—this is not a question, because I have another question after—but one of the quotes is, “Assume the responsibility of building a positive relationship with your boss is 100% your responsibility.” Just check mark. I’m putting that in all caps. Another quote that I love: “Don’t confuse knowledge with judgment,” which is because there are a lot of smart people who we know who make dumb decisions all the time. So-called smart. But I want to go, and this leads into something that will get to a question, which is another quote: “Many leaders rely on simplistic fixes to address complicated organizational problems, and they end up committing malpractice.” So how do we sort of make sure we’re finding the root causes for poor performance organizational problems?

Michael: So, and it’s funny, I think it connects very much to JD’s question, right? It really goes to your confidence that you understand the core of the problem, right, and have the knowledge necessary to solve the problem. And if you do, then, yeah, go, you know, as I say to JD, go for it, right? What you don’t want to be doing is assuming you understand the problem and assuming you have the solution to the problem when the problem is actually a lot more complicated than it looks, right? And maybe that’s because of the culture, maybe it’s because of the history of the org. Maybe it’s because of the stakeholder environment you’re operating in, you know? Maybe it’s because your CEO turns out to be a raving lunatic. I mean, there’s a variety of reasons why this can happen, right? And then it’s a question of you making judgments about how rapidly you move, how deep you want to go. How do you balance the diagnostic process with the action process? There’s real nuance, I think, to it.

Drew: And I want to add in this one thought, which is, I think you have to really be aware of your blind spots more so probably than these other things, because again, we get back to that hammer and that nail thing. And again, you came up as a marketer. You see things in terms of marketing problems, and that could be a really, you know, myopic approach. You know, you’re there to solve business problems and marketing is one route towards that.

Michael: Like, if it really is a nail, hammer away, right? I mean, if it’s a nail, hammer that baby, right? Get the biggest hammer you got and bang away, right? But just be sure it’s a nail and not because you hope it’s a nail, you wish it’s a nail. You know, that’s, I guess, the key point here.

Drew: Okay, we’re getting to the point where we’ve gathered a lot of information. We need to make decisions. You’ve got two processes that you describe, that “consult and decide,” and the other is “consensus, the build consensus.” And I’m paraphrasing, but you sort of say it’s wrong-headed to just use one of these approaches. Why?

Michael: So there’s actually, you know, older and deeper work than this about what’s the right way to approach decision making in different situations. I mean, I have my little rules of thumb here, and one of them is, build consensus. Build sufficient consensus when possible, decide when necessary, right now. Notice that’s not full consensus, because there’s no such thing as full consensus on anything, you know. Herman Swope, famous quote, I’ll paraphrase it, right? “I don’t know how to be successful as a leader, but I can tell you how to fail. That’s try to please everyone.” So I never, you know, I don’t think you ever drive for full consensus. But if you can build sufficient consensus on your leadership team, for example, that’s a good thing, because you’re going to have people bought into, you know, the implementation of the answers, right?

But sometimes, you know, you’re really in these situations where there’s going to be winners and losers. There are sharp edges on what you’re doing. You’re not going to get people to reach consensus, and at some point you just have to make the call. And yeah, people are going to be mad at you, but honestly, it’s better they’re mad at you than they’re mad at each other. And so I think just being thoughtful about what’s the best way to make this decision or engage in this process, rather than just saying, okay, one size fits all. Right, I’m an autocratic leader. I will make the call, you know. Or I’m a consensus-building leader, I will. No, right? It’s situational like so many things are.

Drew: Yeah, and that’s again, we get back to this very sort of, almost this mind of a child coming in, being open, to make sure that you see the right problem, that you are, you know, approaching the right way of solving the problem. You’re building the folks around you and the alliances, so you’re not hanging out there all by yourself, and that you’re solving the big issues, which is really and making sure that you’ve even identified them. We could talk for a long time, and I know there’s a lot of questions, but you have a relatively new book. It came out this year, “The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking,” which I’ve yet to read. But I’m hoping to grab a copy.

Michael: Product placement. Marketing people appreciate the product placement deal. Very nice.

Drew: Very nice. We do.

Michael: I just got those today, by the way.

Drew: Is that right? Maybe we can get you back next year to talk about that book.

Michael: Happy to do it. I’m thinking a lot about strategic thinking these days. I did a presentation for a big US healthcare company today about perspective shifting, right? How do you think about now versus the future, the big picture versus the detail, the short run versus the long run, right? So, and I guess my headline on this, Drew, is given the incredible turbulence we’re facing in the environment, strategic thinking has never been more important than it is right now, right? And then it’s sort of, how do you do that, and how do you learn to be better at it, which I think is the payoff in the end, because I think you can, right? I mean, there’s obviously a piece of this that’s about the mental machinery you’re born with. But like all great human pursuits, I think that the right experience, right, and the right mental exercise can really make a big difference.

Drew: And is this available on audiobook now as well and is it in your voice, or is it someone else’s?

Michael: It is not. They won’t let me do it for my books. I don’t understand why. I think I don’t have a bad voice, but they always bring in these professional voices that always sound a little robotic to me, but, you know.

Drew: Maybe very soon, about a perfect world. But anyway, all right, well, we are going to get you back. I will get it on my list and we’ll be in touch to get you back on the show, because there are a lot of follow-up questions that folks have. I’m going to try to squeeze in one more question before we wrap up, which is building and implementing a 30-60-90-180 plan is especially important for PE-backed firms that typically are at a realignment stage or an inflection point to drive growth. Has your research over the last decade pointed to any insight specific to managing for success within your first 180 days in a PE-backed environment? And I could just use EBITDA, and we’d know it all.

Michael: So, you know, I think that if you’re working for a PE-backed firm, you’re lucky in many ways. I would say that. I know that sounds a little shocking, but, you know, you’ve got rational people, you know, focused on wanting to realize economic value, not managing quarter by quarter, that are, you know, I wouldn’t say stingy, but they’re parsimonious in their resource use, right? Which is not always a bad thing. The best ones will help you build capability now. I see more PE firms that are doing more, not just investing, but actually supporting the growth of companies and helping them create growth platforms and stuff. So I know this sounds a little crazy, but I’m actually kind of a fan.

Drew: Wow. Okay, I would love to have you sit in on some of our conversations. But anyway, if folks wanted to hire your company or you, how do they engage with you?

Michael: The best way always is just to connect with me on LinkedIn. I do my own LinkedIn. I respond to folks. That’s the easiest way to get a hold of me. Maybe if you’re interested, check out my newsletter, “The Leading Edge,” which has a bunch of these articles on it, if you’re interested. But no, please just connect with me.

Drew: Awesome. All right. Well, it’s such a pleasure having you. Thank you so much for joining us today.

If you’re a B2B CMO, and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!