When I was young, I read a Zen koan that I will paraphrase here.

Two monks were playing a game of go when a third monk burst into the room shouting, “Master has told me that the world is ending tomorrow. One of the monks looked up from the game and declared, “If that’s the case, I have spent a lifetime eating simple, basic foods. I have never experienced the delights of gourmet cooking. I am going to have a fancy meal.” The monk that burst in added, “I have spent my life celibate. I have never experienced the pleasure of a woman. I shall go experience that earthly delight.”

The two monks moved toward the door then noticed the third monk was still seated. One of the two turned toward the seated monk and asked, “What will you do, brother?” The monk looked up from studying the go board. “I shall finish the game.”

In that koan, only one of the monks was living his best life. He was right where he wanted to be. The other two were postponing their respective lives. To the degree that we can live regret-free, living our best lives needs to happen in the present moment. In the present moment is where we can suck the marrow of life.

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…” Henry David Thoreau

We yearn for purpose. Purpose drives our behaviors, actions, and underpins our self image. If we lack purpose we feel lost. So purpose occupies us either in its presence driving us toward a particular focus or its absence driving us to find one. Our chosen purpose is our calling and may lead to our vocation. Our purpose makes us relevant and underwrites our strategy to achieve relevance. We will get into that later.

Research suggests that people with a purpose in life live longer, have a better immune system and perform better when controlling for lifestyle, personality, and other longevity related factors. Not only do we yearn for purpose, it makes us healthier. It then behooves us to have a purpose. But, where does purpose come from?

Please read the entire article here.

Anyone job searching has seen listings for strategy & operations [S&O] positions. Typically, these positions call for senior experienced people with a strong grasp of business, business operations and strategy development. Organizations rely on strategy to provide structured direction and operations to ensure that we are delivering on that plan. The S&O team ensures an effective collaborative marriage between those activities to deliver long-term and short-term goals, requiring aligned efforts between finances, production operations, sales/marketing, supply chain, offering development, and other supporting services.

The role title is expansive, seemingly covering the entirety of everything that drives a business. Having served as Head of S&O for one of Google Search engineering organizations, I can affirm that the role is fast paced, challenging and demanding. However, it is not all things strategy and operations. Rather, the S&O effort provides a framework for facilitating leadership decision-making by providing curated, rapidly digestible intelligence at the moment of its greatest need.

The effort requires a chaotic dance between driving a structured cadence and flexing toward emerging, disruptive discoveries, challenges and opportunities, packaging it in an elegant way that separates the signal from the noise. That sounds messy, and it is. But if managed deftly, most days, we can orchestrate delivering the right information to the right people at the right time.

[Read the rest of the article here.][1]

[1]: https://medium.com/@sarah.l.p.marshall/what-does-the-strategy-operations-role-do-ead129cc1a2c

The business model provides the structure for delivering on the organization’s direction. It provides the framework for the operations needed to support the organization’s mission and is the genesis of the business structures that drive the functional-expertise required to optimize those structures.

Organizations refresh the direction, and by nature the supporting business model, on a regular cadence, typically on an annual basis. Following the directional shift, or in parallel with that change, functional leaders revisit their aspect of the business model and make adjustments to better support the strategic direction.

Those adjustments range from narrow, requiring incremental adjustments, to radical, requiring a multi-year transformational rebuild of the business model. No matter the extent of the alteration, the business model will change. Regardless of where we sit in this change, supporting enterprise-level adjustments, within a function adjusting one aspect of the shift, or on a team deep within the organization navigating change coming at us, it is important to understand the entire business model to understand our part in delivering our mission and the knock-on effects of the changes we make locally.

The age-old challenge for organization leaders is two-fold – determining the most effective direction for the organization and then aligning the organization to that purpose. This challenge is the purview of CEOs, political, military, municipal, community, and other organizational leaders, who are in the high stakes position of understanding the ecosystem in which their organization lives and discerning the path that allows the organization to thrive.

This article focuses on how to align an organization to its purpose. This aligning-effort requires, in turn, capturing the hearts and minds of the team and then building the structures within the organization to support the direction. This process of setting direction, capturing hearts and minds, and then building support structures happens naturally under every leader for every organization since the dawn of leadership. That is not to say that it happens well. That directional alignment may fail. Alignment has a long history of frequent failure. Even for organizations that succeed in aligning, success might be marginal, yielding a slow shift due to poor performance and inefficient structures. This article outlines an approach to ensure our organization is aligned to the emerging purpose and supercharges the shift towards the new direction.

Read the rest of the article here.

Catastrophic failure introduced me to change management as a discipline. I was a member of the leadership team charged with radically transforming the enterprise practices and processes while deploying a broad ranging ERP platform. It was a multi-process, multi-phased, multi-year effort to radically improve the performance of a large multinational company. The program was so large that our team of vice presidents and directors, around 20 of us, were sized as its own function with hundreds of employees working full time on the effort. After over a year of discovery and design we were poised to launch the first phase. As we tend to do with these large efforts, we chose the “easiest” changes to deploy first. The expense and accounting processes were our most rigorously documented and well understood. So we believed that launching those processes first would be straight forward. Launch proved us wrong. The delivered capability proved unusable and was rolled back within days. Our executive leader was relieved of her duties and the reshuffle of our leadership team immediately followed. I was asked, well urged, to join a hastily assembled change management team to lead business readiness.

We now have our arms around our strategically aligned solution in the ‘Solutioning for Value’ article. We understand its projected value and the broad strokes of what we want to deliver. Now it is time to realize the solution in the organization. Our next step in building our value delivery machine is to design and deliver the solution. We need to establish the delivery program.

Just a reminder, the execution phases discussed in this and the next article include all aspects of the solution — organization and people, practices and process, and systems architecture. Because the operations and people aspect requires extensive treatment and a unique set of methodologies, we will cover it in the ‘Guiding Organizations through Change’ article. Keep in mind that regardless of which aspect we are discussing, the efforts occur simultaneously in each phase.

Finally, to continuously deliver the highest value to the enterprise, we are engaged in an ongoing learning feedback loop. We need to be tuned into that feedback and ready to adjust to emerging learnings. As we progress through the phases we will continue to identify previously unseen failure points, performance challenges, and new opportunities that we might pursue. Additionally, our operating ecosystem will change, potentially adjusting our objectives. The more complex the program and the longer the duration of the program, the more new stuff we will have to navigate. We need to remain on top of all of the learnings and change and we are heads down doing the noble work of execution.

Creating a Value Delivery Machine — Series

I have a confession to make. I do not love ‘process’. Nor do I love enterprise tooling. I am ambivalent about both. While either, or both in combination, provide clarity, consistency, insight, and alignment on common efforts across complex organizations and even more complex workflows, they also cause inflexibility and represent both a development and an ongoing maintenance investment. These days, when developing operations or programs to deliver operational changes, my obsession is in delivering value. In order to deliver value we need to understand the entire ecosystem and the full set of implications, good and bad, for any delivered solution.

As a young program manager I had the luxury of setting up programs simply focused on designing and building to outcome expectations. The work was challenging and complex, but had a clear end state. As I progressed through my career as I took on new roles, I was organically introduced to the broader organizational ecosystem in which a program lives. In turn, I have served as a program portfolio owner, change manager, operations owner, transformation leader, strategist and organization leader. In those roles I became intimately familiar with the entire spine for creating operational value.

In this series we tackle the framework for organizational improvement by identifying and delivering the highest possible value through planned organizational efforts. Our discussion has three parts:

• Solutioning for value — Defining the gap between current state and our business model needs and then designing the solution that yields the highest value to the organization.

• Framing the delivery programs — Designing and resourcing the program or programs that will deliver that solution.

• Guiding organizations through change — Dealing with the human side of the equation to ensure that the organization is ready to receive the solution and that we hit our adoption targets.

This effort covers the last three steps in the value delivery spine — defining, designing and delivering solutions.

Creating a Value Delivery Machine Part 1 of 3: Solutioning for Value

Since I started my career organizations have chased big objectives, and delivered complex programs that have moved organizations toward their objectives. Over those many years, popular approaches to accomplishing that work have been substantially refined and consultancies have flourished in supporting all aspects of the value delivery efforts. In the meantime, I have had the opportunity to work in, manage and develop frameworks to support those activities. However, I have rarely seen materials that address the value delivery spine in its entirety.

High Value, Robust Solutioning

In this article we will discuss a general approach to developing solutions. Solution development is an exercise in casting into the vague future with incomplete intelligence and developing a tangible approach for which we will invest our precious time, people, money, and other company resources, in the belief that that effort will bring us meaningfully closer to achieving our objective. These efforts are focused on bridging the gap between where we are today and where we need to be to deliver on our vision and mission. That gap represents a problem to solve. A clear problem statement enables us to define a solution structure to solve that problem. Once we fully understand that solution, we can plan the work to deliver that solution. As I mentioned, this effort is full of vagaries and unknowns.

Read the rest of the article here.

In this, the final chapter of the culture series, we will put together the concepts we discussed in the first two articles covering both culture development and infrastructure design, to address the issues exposed in the case study below. If you have not read the previous articles please catch up at:

The Power of Culture Part 1: The Power of Belief

The Power of Culture Part 2: The Power of Infrastructure

The Case Study

For this culture series, and frankly the next set of articles I have planned, there is a lot to unpack. We need a way to explore the concepts provided. To that end, the case study below is an amalgam of multiple real experiences built into a single fictional company, using the most famous fictional company moniker — ACME, Inc. Please see the extended case study description here. It provides details for ACME’s situation, business model, culture, ACME’s functions, and their geographic location.

So far, in part 1 of our exploration of culture we have focused on the ‘soft side’ addressing the development of the beliefs, values and norms that crystalize our culture. In part 2 we tackle the ‘hard side’ focusing on infrastructure, infrastructure’s grown up sibling institutions, and the relationship between culture and infrastructure / institutions.

The ‘hard side’ evolves from scientific discovery. Over the past 50 years technology has replaced physical infrastructure with technical solutions with examples ranging broadly.

• Paper has largely been replaced by screens and workplace tools.

• Offices and conference rooms have been augmented with video conferencing.

• Business operations of all stripes have been codified into sprawling multipurpose platforms such as enterprise resource planning [ERP], customer relationship management [CRM], and human capital management [HCM]

• Filing cabinets and collaborative tools have been replaced by cloud storage.

We can go on. But, you get the idea. Technology continues to support a greater and greater amount of our infrastructure needs. Science continues to deliver supporting infrastructure. We as change agents need to determine when and how to use those technologies to their best effect.

Early in my career, when we needed to change things within the company to pursue an opportunity or improve performance, we just did it. Little thought was given to how it impacted people or how it might change company perception. In retrospect, I consider myself, and the companies in which I worked, incredibly lucky that any of the changes took hold or saw success. Since my early days as a young engineer I have witnessed spectacular failures in delivering enterprise change. Some of those failures ended the companies attempting them.

I confess, I am a Boomer. I began my career in the final days of the paternal contract between caretaking companies and their lifetime employees. Additionally, we lived in a tacit agreement that the company would work in the best interests of employees and the communities in which we were placed. My first professional employer was considered the ‘it’ company for innovators. That said, even truly innovative companies moved at a deliberate pace, during my early career.

Since then, Gen X, the Millennials, and Gen Z have entered the workforce. Desktops have been replaced with laptops and mobile devices. Technology has moved from the edges to the center of our lives. Company loyalty, in either direction, has all but disappeared. Both sides are culturally expected to make employment decisions in their own best interests. Companies serve their mission. We, guns for hire, are expected to manage our own careers to our own objectives. The cadence for change and improvements has moved from deliberated, thoughtful and delivered in waves to hypersonic and constant. Technology development and use cases are moving so fast that it is hard for anyone to keep up. Those of us responsible for company development, improvement changes, and transformation live in a world of relentless flux.

Change is a high risk game. Those of use that do this sort of work seek to reduce that risk wherever possible. The first stop for anyone leading broad changes is the culture of the organization. Why? Culture seems so ethereal and, well, squishy. Whatever our work, wherever we live, culture is the water in which we swim. Because it surrounds us at all times it becomes hard to notice, unless someone is pointing it out. Yet, culture has a profound impact on the success of the changes we make, the solutions we offer, our behaviors in executing our duties. This article is the first in a three part series on culture.

Read the full article here.

Several years ago, I was the value chain lead for a computer peripherals company. The company served a large funnel for retail consumer peripherals as its main business model. However, it had several other hardware device businesses that were struggling to establish effective end-to-end value chains to support their business models, from sales through reverse logistics. The three business models used by the company were:

B2C - positioning products with retailers via distributor channels

B2B - positioning products with businesses via integrator channels

OEM - making and positioning customer branded products via customer channels

My job was to assess each current value chain for each product line business model, identify the gaps, recommend solutions, and put together cross functional teams to make the changes. When the newly hired OEM sales executive approached me with her strategy to turn around our flagging OEM business, I was excited. The business had been in decline for several years. She had developed a new sales strategy for engaging the OEM customers that was designed to increase revenues, drive down cost points, and be much better positioned and more responsive to product demands. Our discussion and my excitement for driving the transformation resulted in me becoming an international road warrior spending the better part of my life in Asia and Europe, touching every function in the company, on our journey of transformation.

A few years ago I stepped into a role leading strategy and operations for an engineering organization within a large software company. This sort of effort within engineering organizations is typically called Product Operations or ProdOps for short. During my first sit-down with my manager I asked how well the organization understood what ProdOps is and does. Her response was, “Zero. We’re starting from scratch.” That caused me to raise an eyebrow. Before I could build, run or even tweak an effort, I needed to make the case for ProdOps value.

This case making would be no small feat. This engineering organization was positioned in the heart of the company’s chief product and platform. They had run for over 20 years with largely only engineers left to their own devices to deliver ‘Wow!’ products to users. Their strategy had resulted in a long stream of products that were so cool that adoption was counted in the millions and billions of users. In this world, if a product did not inspire that sort of organic adoption, they would discard it. The formula had worked for years. No one wanted to lose that magic. So why bring in overhead generators, such as a strategy & operations lead, that would likely cause extra work that might screw with the magic.

A few years ago, I was discussing the company’s OKR tracking with one of the technical leads. For those of you unfamiliar with OKRs, OKR is an acronym for Objectives & Key Results. It is a process for making periodic strategic commitments. Once the commitment is approved, teams build projects and programs to meet those commitments. Once the programs and projects are in motion, progress is tracked with updates on a regular cycle. Often these OKRs are set annually and tracked at least quarterly.

The technical lead asked me what happens with the updates. He had been making updates for years, but never heard anything back. I realized that underlying his question was an expectation that there was a one-to-one relationship with update and executive response/action. That one-to-one interaction works well at the team lead level. Both the update provider and that team decision maker are in parity about the details of the effort. They have the same language, considerations, and ultimately the same stakes in the decision. This is not the case for executive leadership. Executive leadership concerns are ‘holistic’. By that, I mean an executive leader is considering all of the organization’s commitments, projects and programs, major risks and issues, health of the folks, long term bets, and interactions with both development partners and customers.

Strategy is a word that is bandied about in the halls of enterprises, governments, and academia globally. It sounds important. So we include it in our resumes and use it as a talking point in meetings. Yet, if pressed, most people either misunderstand what strategy is or think strategy crafting is mysterious and confusing.

Not content with the complexities and intricacies of strategy development, i have thrown in this new term ‘learning strategy.’ To define ‘learning strategy,’ we first need to understand how to build and execute strategy. Let’s first demystify the concepts of strategy development.

When I was still relatively early in my career, and took the helm of a manufacturing operations organization, the predominant model for operations was that they should be stable, crank-turning efforts delivering consistently. Operational processes within that model were relatively fixed, quickly institutionalized, and incrementally improved. That is not the world we live in today.

Don’t get me wrong. There is still a place for stable processes. Pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing, air traffic control systems, satellite manufacturing, auto manufacturing and any other life and/or mission critical activities require highly stable, repeatable, and monitorable processes. That said, those types of processes are the exceptions rather than the rule these days.

We live in a world of disruption. We are simultaneously experiencing globalization and localization across all sectors. New business models are emerging while others are sun-setting. New technology, [hello ChatGPT], are setting flames to old ways of doing work. Customer preferences are radically changing as younger generations become the dominant spenders and power users. The regulation tapestry shifts daily with local and regional requirements reverberating globally. Operational stability in an unstable world requires a different kind of thinking.

Please read the rest of the article here.

Since the early 2000s I have been part of a village that undertakes the annual project of building and running an ongoing concern in the stark and remote Black Rock desert for the Burning Man festival. For those that have never been to the event, seated villages and camps provide contributions to passers by as their imagination and wherewithal are able to provide. Since Burning Man operates in a gifting culture, contribution means providing a service, experience, or trinket without expectation of compensation. The village, ranging from 70 to 300 members, and all that it does, is our gift to the Black Rock City citizens. Annually we like minded folks get together and plan, build, run our creative project for a bit over a week, then pack it all up, and leave the desert playa in the pristine condition that it was in when we arrived.

At some point early on, I offered to lead our group of volunteers in our project using my project and operations management skills. That year extended to multiple years after which I took a needed hiatus. We rotated leads year to year. Some were ambitious at the cost to the villagers in time and effort. Others were not very organized. The fortunes and standing of the village rose and fell with the adeptness of the lead. Complicating matters was the level of fluidity we experienced as a village. While a handful of folks returned most years, many of the members floated in and out of the village, occasionally camping with us. Some just took time off between forays into the desert. Others tried out village life for a year then moved on to other things. Year to year the new and inexperienced villagers ranged from a quarter to half the village. Additionally, the camps within the village would vary. We always hosted three to four camps, each providing different experiences. However, camps would often shift their focus year to year or move in or out depending on their own interests. Finally, the event organization changed requirements from year to year as well. So the village was literally an annual experiment and newly defined project for whoever was leading.

One of my work-life commitments is to leave a durable improvement that transcends my time in a role. For years, during my first couple of rounds leading the village I did not meaningfully extend that commitment to village leadership. However, on my third stint as the lead I went into it realizing that my time in the role would be limited. I wanted to provide a durable stability to the village. In my mind, that meant creating a structure that stabilized the leadership approach year to year regardless of who was leading.