Contents
Chapter 1 The Must-Win Battle Journey
This chapter provides a roadmap for the book, introducing and defining must-win battles (MWBs) and what the journey to achieving them involves.
Section I Preparing the Journey
Chapter 2 Understanding Your Starting Conditions
Every business embarks on their MWB journey from a different place. These unique starting conditions will impact the choice of MWBs, the urgency surrounding their execution and the relative emphasis on the emotional versus the intellectual elements of the journey. This chapter highlights the four critical starting conditions that need to be understood, provides tools to think about each, and translates them into implications for the MWB process.
Chapter 3 What does it take to lead on a MWB journey?
Even if the business conditions point towards a MWB journey, there is one more critical question for the leader before she or he commits to the process: am I capable of leading it? Leading a MWB journey is a big challenge, requiring skills and capabilities of a leader that go well beyond managing “business as usual”. Preparing for the journey explores the “leadership imperatives” or challenges inherent in the MWB process. It offers tools to assess the leader’s readiness to lead the journey, which can entail high personal risk and need to change…as well as approaches to manage these risks and demands. Because once it starts there really is no opportunity to turn back.
Section II Engaging the Team
Chapter 4 Opening Windows: Sharing Perspectives and Realities
Opening windows activities and exercises start the group moving forward on both the emotional and intellectual dimensions in parallel. The aims are to build a shared understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the business, while at the same time, surfacing the team’s personal feelings about how the top team works together. Detailed outlines of exercises together with real-world examples illustrate how the transparency of the discussions begins sharing and aligning the team’s perspectives and starting new ways of working together.
Chapter 5 Defining the Battles: Colliding to Decide
As the team moves into the iterative process that is defining must-win battles, things are starting to get real. There will be winners and losers as the long list of potential initiatives gets robustly challenged to reach the shortlist of 3 to 5 battles that will receive the lion’s share of management attention and resources in the coming months and years. The shared understandings and openness built by in the previous stage are the critical background for ensuring productive dialogue at this stage. The characteristics of well-chosen MWBs are outlined, along with exercises and real-world examples to illustrate how this process works in practice.
Chapter 6 Breaking the Silos: Committing to One Agenda
Even the best-chosen list of MWBs runs the risk of failure if the team is not committed to implementing it back at the office. The final part of the kick-off process is about making this critical emotional commitment to a collective agenda – moving away from silo-based, individualistic thinking. Again through exercises and examples, the chapter addresses the tough questions of how the team will work together in future to ensure battles are won, and how each individual within the team will contribute – or, in some cases, choose not to participate. It also sets the stage for taking the MWB agenda back to the office – to engage the broader organization.
Section III Making It Happen
Chapter 7 Engaging the Organization
The top team is not going to get far trying to win the MWBs alone – they need to quickly embed the agenda in the broader organization, aligning activities and getting momentum going if they are to win in their marketplace. But this is easier said than done – and will require energy, tenacity and courage from the organization’s leaders: mobilizing resources and actions against the battles and motivating people to deliver. Using a series of examples and tools, the chapter discusses the key stages of this process, and the major challenges that need to be overcome including dealing with the “organizational swamp” of daily activities, maintaining energy levels across the company and refocusing battles which are off track.
Chapter 8 From Tent to Tent: The Unilever Ice-Cream Journey
Kees van der Graaf (President, Europe of Unilever) provides a candid perspective on how the MWB journey unfolds in practice. The chapter tells the story of the first two years of the Unilever Ice-Cream division’s journey, its ups and downs, achievements and lessons learned, both for the leader and the organization.
Chapter 9 Lessons from MWB Journeys Won and Lost
A final round-up highlights, briefly, the core principles that you can apply to your critical business challenges, whether or not you choose to embark on a MWB journey.