Management Questions

4 Central Questions for Managing a Multi-business Company

Administrator — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:30:23 +0000

What are the boundaries of the corporation—which businesses should be part of the corporate portfolio and what is the underlying logic?
How should resources—and capital, in particular—be allocated to the different businesses?
How can the goals and actions of the individual business units be aligned with the interests of the corporation as a whole and with the interests of its shareholders?
What is the real operating value of a particular business, and is that value being maximized in the current corporate structure or would a different owner do better?

Source: Corporate Portfolio Management: Theory and Practice by Ulrich Pidun, Harald Rubner, Matthias Krühler, Robert Untiedt, Michael Nippa | Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Respect Questions

Administrator — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:48:40 +0000

To determine how well an organization exhibits respect, leaders can ask the following types of questions:

Recognition respect: Do we know who our customers are? Does our market research treat customers simply as numbers or does it reveal their values, wants, and needs? Do we understand the cultural context?
Evaluation respect: Which customers can we best serve? Are these our current market segments? How can we treat all our customers fairly, but not necessarily equally, according to clearly communicated criteria, such as gold and platinum customer accounts or benefactor and patron donor levels?
Deference respect: Do we understand the contributions of our customers to important metrics such as cash flow and organic growth? In our business, to what degree should we defer to customer tastes rather than lead customers in new directions?
Attitudinal respect: Is our company culture one where all employees believe all customers should be respected, regardless of status or monetary worth? Do we believe the customer is (almost) always right?
Behavioral respect: Do we treat customers respectfully in all service encounters? Do we ask customers’ permission to collect, use, and retain sensitive personal information or to receive direct-marketing communications? How often do our leaders meet face-to-face with customers?

Source: Respect Your Customers by John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz | Leader to Leader, Summer 2011

Questions for Using Scenario Planning

Administrator — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:04:26 +0000

What does success look like in this scenario?
In what markets will we play and which customers will we serve?
How will we serve those customers?
What capabilities will we need to have in place?
Which actions should we prioritize? Which ones are robust across all scenarios and which are contingent depending on how the future unfolds?
How would we know if this scenario were going to come true (in order to
quickly revisit/re-prioritize our options if necessary)?

Source: Future-Proofing Your Organisation by Nick Turner |
the-chiefexecutive.com

8 Questions to Align CEO and Board

Administrator — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 15:09:44 +0000

The Harvard Business Review pulled together a list of questions that CEOs and boards can ask each other to try to bring their mutual goals more in line with each other.

Where should we place our primary focus – shareholders, stakeholders or society at large?
What is long-term shareholder value really about and how is it created?
Can we influence who our shareholders are?
What is our responsibility to the survival of the firm as an institution?
What changes should we make in our pay practices to encourage long-term value creation?
What should we be doing to build the intrinsic motivation of our people, recognizing the possibility that our pay practices might be a detriment to motivation?
Do we need to rethink the role of corporate social responsibility in our firm?
What should we be doing now to ensure an internal successor is ready when the CEO retires?

Source: 8 Questions to Settle the CEO vs. Board Conflict | Harvard Business Review, ChiefExecutive.net

Organization Design and Operating Model Questions

Administrator — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:32:50 +0000

What should our business model look like in three to five years as the implications of our business strategy play out?
What balance do we need on the spectrum of centralization vs. a distributed network of business entities? How should we be structured to best support our business strategy: by geography, product, function, customer—or a hybrid arrangement?
Do we have the right organization design in place to help the workforce perform optimally? Are the right governance and decision-making mechanisms in place? Do we have the right leverage and the right organization structure (the pyramid of different roles and responsibilities) to execute in a cost-effective manner?
Do we have the right analytics and tools in place to monitor workforce performance and make timely changes?
Do we have management processes that keep workforce performance continuously aligned with a changing business strategy? Do we understand our informal networks that work side-by-side with formal structures—networks that have a powerful impact on how work gets done?
Is our HR organization designed to support the workforce in a cost-effective manner? Is HR participating in strategic discussions at a high-enough level in the company?
Are there any constraints in the HR organization that would impede our ability to get the right capabilities and people into the company, develop them and retain them? Do the right HR processes exist, and is HR effectively integrated into the business?

Source: A New Lens on Business Advantage: Human Capital Strategy and the Drive for High Performance by David Smith, Yaarit Silverstone and Adrian Lajtha | Accenture

10 Questions to Ask About Customer Service Failures

Administrator — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 01:36:01 +0000

How are you going to handle the problem for the customer? Think about an immediate solution, delivered with the right attitude and a sense of urgency that will restore the customer’s confidence in you.Photo: Gene Selkov/Flickr (Creative Commons)
Why did it happen? Do an analysis to determine why this happened.
Has it happened before? If it has happened before, why did it happen again? Do an analysis to determine the problem and what you can do to prevent, or at least minimize, the chances of this happening again.
Can it happen again? If this is the first time the problem or mistake has occurred, determine what you can do to prevent it from happening again. (See question number five.)
Can a process be put in place to prevent it from happening again? This is the follow up to question number four. If there is a process that you can put in place to prevent the problem or mistake from occurring again, do it.
Can you catch it before the customer calls you? This is very important. If you know the problem can potentially happen, have a system in place to check and either fix it before the customer finds out or let the customer know before they find out on their own. In other words, be proactive.
Who’s involved in preventing it from happening (again)? Determine who is responsible for eliminating the problem and what has to be done.
If this is a problem that doesn’t happen often, if ever (a “freak occurrence”), what would you do differently if in the same situation? After the problem has been brought to your attention and ultimately resolved, decide if this was the best way to handle it, or if there is a better way.
Is there information now that we didn’t have before it happened? If this is the first time the problem or mistake took place, you should be able to find new data or an experience that will help you prevent it from happening again.
What did we learn from it? Look at all of the answers to the above questions. You should have several insights on what happened, why it happened and how to prevent it from happening again.

These questions apply for both your external and internal customers.

Source: Customer Service Strategy: Ten Questions to Ask When Something Fails by Shep Hyken

Cyber Security Questions

Administrator — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:23:49 +0000

Who is responsible for developing and maintaining our cross-functional approach to cybersecurity? To what extent are business leaders (as opposed to IT or risk executives) owning this issue?
Which information assets are most critical, and what is the “value at stake” in the event of a breach? What promises—implicit or explicit—have we made to our customers and partners to protect their information?
What roles do cybersecurity and trust play in our customer value proposition—and how do we take steps to keep data secure and support the end-to-end customer experience?
How are we using technology, business processes, and other efforts to protect our critical information assets? How does our approach compare with that of our peers and best practices?
Is our approach continuing to evolve, and are we changing our business processes accordingly?
Are we managing our vendor and partner relationships to ensure the mutual protection of information?
As an industry, are we working effectively together and with appropriate government entities to reduce cybersecurity threats?

Source: Meeting the cybersecurity challenge by James Kaplan, Shantnu Sharma, and Allen Weinberg | The McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011

10 Strategy Tests

Administrator — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:42:54 +0000

Ultimately, strategy is a way of thinking, not a procedural exercise or a set of frameworks. To stimulate that thinking and the dialogue that goes along with it, we developed a set of tests aimed at helping executives assess the strength of their strategies. We focused on testing the strategy itself (in other words, the output of the strategy-development process), rather than the frameworks, tools, and approaches that generate strategies, for two reasons. First, companies develop strategy in many different ways, often idiosyncratic to their organizations, people, and markets. Second, many strategies emerge over time rather than from a process of deliberate formulation.

There are ten tests on our list, and not all are created equal. The first—“will it beat the market?”—is comprehensive. The remaining nine disaggregate the picture of a market-beating strategy, though it’s certainly possible for a strategy to succeed without “passing” all nine of them.

Will your strategy beat the market?
Does your strategy tap a true source of advantage?
Is your strategy granular about where to compete?
Does your strategy put you ahead of trends?
Does your strategy rest on privileged insights?
Does your strategy embrace uncertainty?
Does your strategy balance commitment and flexibility?
Is your strategy contaminated by bias?
Is there conviction to act on your strategy?
Have you translated your strategy into an action plan?

Source: Have you tested your strategy lately? by Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit | The McKinsey Quarterly

Turning around Problem Performance in Five Questions or Less

Administrator — Fri, 20 May 2011 15:57:18 +0000

The following series of five yes-or-no questions can help you manage future performance in a new way. Your answers will steer you toward a turnaround conversation appropriate to the situation and the underperformer.

Once you become familiar with the questions you’ll be able to assess which conversation is needed in a matter of minutes. You’ll be on your way to managing underperformance instead of living with its effects.

Ask yourself:

Does the person know what’s expected?
Has the person performed to standard in the past?
Have you already addressed the performance problem more than once?
Does the person have the capability of performing to standard?
Is the person coachable?

Source: How to Turn around Problem Performance in Five Questions or Less by Jim Bolton | ChangeThis, Feb. 16, 2011

Customer Engagement Questions

Administrator — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 17:50:52 +0000

Can we create a reliable story around what we do?
Can we create symbols, rituals, or culture around our offerings?
Can we create and mobilize tribes to help our cause?
Can we leverage the power of every individual within our company to humanize our brand and create more passion around what we do?

Source: The Seven Myths of Hyper-Social Organizations: Why Human 1.0 is Key by Francois Gossieaux | ChangeThis, Feb. 16, 2011