Session Information:

Zero Waste Strategy Execution - Optimizing for the Scarcity of Everything

Talent, natural resources, capital, supplies, and transportation — everything is scarce today. Compounding the scarcity of everything with the acceleration of business and tech cycles, and business-as-usual strategy execution puts your organization at a huge disadvantage.

Both large and fast organizations are modernizing how they align and drive strategy execution with technology to establish a digital operating rhythm. In a digital operating rhythm, long-range strategy, iterative quarterly objectives and key results (OKRs), monthly business reviews, and focused weeklies are all data-driven, efficient, and transparent with strategy as the golden thread.

In this session, learn how Humana, T-Mobile, Astra Zeneca, VMware, Zendesk, and others accelerate strategy execution today:

• OKRs and outcome mindsets accelerate innovation
• Why a digital operating rhythm is a core to digital transformation
• The ROI and competitive advantages of zero-waste strategy execution
• Where to start or how to catch up with competitors

Session Transcript:

Talking about Daydream pack that she has founded and led, three tech startups, acquire companies and been acquired, and lead a high growth business as an executive at IBM for several years.

This affords her a unique perspective on using both speed and scale to drive growth in her role as CEO at the work board. She works with senior leadership teams at some of the world's largest companies to clarify line and drive strategic priorities with greater speed and Agility Deidre is going to talk to us about zero waste, strategy execution. Optimizing for the scarcity of everything. She will be showing you the presentation, but should not be on video just the presentation, in case you're wondering so daydream Thank you so much for taking the time or sharing your experience and wisdom with our global audience today.

All right, I am delighted to be here. Thank you for that introduction.

I am, as Jose said, CEO and co-founder at Work Board, Inc. And we have, by way of introduction the opportunity to work with some of the world's fastest growing companies and some of the world's largest.

And they, as many of you, are looking for ways to accelerate the rhythm of their business and to execute strategy in the face of ongoing headwinds.

Today we are faced with the scarcity of everything.

Talent is scarce. Time is precious.

Natural resources are driving sustainability programs at every company with the awareness that natural resources, too, are scarce.

Capital is more scarce as interest rates, rise and inflation pressures on us.

Supplies in the supply chain are scarce and unpredictable, and the attention of our workforce is also scarce.

Now, combine scarcity with new speed.

Technology cycles and business cycles are not only coming faster and faster, but there are bigger degrees of change with each cycle.

Our teams are distributed, distracted and after prolonged isolation and disconnection.

And we operate in the face of 40 year high inflation.

It's a confluence of business dynamics that are converging pressure points that require us to operate differently than we have in the past.

Now those three forces require us to optimize, accelerate, and engage and retain our talented people.

Now, optimization is using our capacity and resources for their highest impact acceleration that's iterating and innovating and teaming at higher speeds and retaining our team members means engaging them in purpose.

It means unlocking their innovation potential and helping them team for a reason, not for a hierarchy.

Leaders with a bold strategy and urgency to achieve it.

For example, leaders driving the transformation of their business are moving to a more intelligent and more intentional, digital operating rhythm.

So they can execute their strategy with no waste, zero waste strategy execution.

There are four hallmarks of zero waste strategy execution.

It's more intentional.

It's more iterative.

It's more inclusive, and it's more intelligent.

Now, let's walk through each of those.

zero waste strategy execution is incredibly intentional about the long range strategy, the short range quarter objectives.

Those are the mechanisms for aligning the organization on the strategy.

And it's equally intentional about how you drive strategy execution.

The Monthly business and Opera apps reviews the weekly calibrations, and one-on-one.

And, of course, the data that informs those things with analytics and dashboards that in its totality is the operating rhythm.

The cadence of alignment and the cadence of accountability for the strategy we've aligned on.

Now, in a more intentional, zero waste strategy execution model, the operating rhythm is faster than it used to be. It's not a five-year plan with one-year objectives and quarterly business reviews.

It's an annual refresh of the strategy, quarterly objectives and specific targets, monthly, ops and business reviews and weekly focus.

It's a faster operating rhythm, vaster cadence, The second aspect of an intentional approach is it uses modern rituals.

Not antiquated rituals, modern rituals like, the o.k.r.s framework, Objectives and key Results that are set quarterly, and those objectives and key results define and align the outcomes, not the activity, but the outcomes.

We seek for the business.

That's a major shift for most organizations that have for decades, tracked and managed activity.

Without clarity on the outcomes that activity drives, the modern ritual enables everyone to think about aline on and measure.

The results their work should create each quarter.

And the third intentional shift is rather than alignment at the top of the organization, rather than the senior leaders knowing the strategy.

And everyone else guessing what it might be.

There is broad alignment.

Every team in the organization is aligned on the objectives and results they drive in the quarter, so that all of the organization's capacity is aligned on those results, focused on those results.

Now, if you've recently done a survey to assess how many employees understand the strategy and how to contribute to it, odds are, your survey said that less than 60% of the organization actually knew the strategy.

What that means is 40% of your organization's intellectual horsepower, 40% of the organization's capacity does not know how to contribute to the strategy and its achievement.

An intentional strategy execution approach drives high alignment broadly across the organization, So it doesn't waste any capacity.

Next, hallmark of zero waste strategy execution is that it's more iterative.

It will iterate and align on objectives, and target results quarterly, the, each quarter, you capture, external changes, internal changes, and learnings.

And you have a quarterly cadence of incorporating what's learned and what's changed into the setting of objectivism results for the following corner.

That enables organizations to test their assumptions for long range strategy more often.

And as business cycles and technology cycles accelerate, those assumptions are proven in disproving much faster than they used to be.

So an iterative cycle captures learnings each quarter to set target objectives and results for the following quarter.

Those results in form, the assumptions that underpin the long range strategy.

So you can course correct and adjust on the long range quickly as well.

Teams iterate and realign frequently, and that frequency is how we ensure that capacity is not diluted or lost.

Can we make sure that we're not all executing against a stale plan that we know is no longer valid?

Can we dial in energies and efforts on what matters in the coming quarter and how we quickly katcher, rather than waste our learnings from the prior quarter?

Now, to iterate on strategic priorities, on objectives, and results across the organization, on a quarterly basis, four times, more often, than you have in the past, and probably much deeper alignment than you've used in the past. You need a system to enable that.

Otherwise, you just don't have the agility and the efficiency to do that kind of iteration.

And the system also helps ensure that the data from the quarterly results, and the quarterly learnings, is actually usable data in assessing how the assumptions in the long range strategy may have changed.

The next hallmark is that it's more inclusive, rather than being concentrated in the leadership teams at the top of the organization.

Strategy execution in a zero waste world includes teams across the organization.

They are how you execute the strategy, their time, their talent, their attention, are essential to a zero waste strategy execution model.

The first element here is that teams, not individuals'. teams are the engine of value creation.

You want to tap the brainpower and the willpower of your team members.

Objectives and key results.

The modern ritual of aligning is a team sport. It's a team conversation.

The team shares authorship and ownership, what those objectives and key results are for the quarter.

It is not a classic cascade of managers dictating targets to their teams and teams not being included in the conversation about what those targets are or why.

When that not included in the conversation, when they're not included in the thinking, you don't get the benefit of their thinking and you don't get the full force of their willpower to drive that strategy execution.

The next element of inclusion is enabling strategic thinking, deepen the organization, as teams define and align on their objectives and key results locally, as they have local clarity and alignment to the global direction.

They're more empowered, more enabled to make smart decisions that are outcome driven in the moment, not three weeks later in the meeting, in the moment, so you don't waste time to progress that strategy.

Now, if your workforce is distributed and a big part of it is still working from home, that ability to make the smartest decision in the moment. The strategic outcome oriented decision in the moment, is especially crucial.

When people need to go to a meeting, whether that's a weekly or monthly meeting, to get the facts, and to get the understanding and make a decision, you are losing weeks and weeks and weeks of execution capacity every quarter.

And the last in inclusion is, the operating rhythm.

The strategy execution model needs to be efficient, unfulfilling, every participant for every stakeholder, And many organizations have a very burdensome management reporting exercise where the management reporting is for the benefit of senior leaders.

It is a tax and a drag on people in their organization.

The inclusive approach is to reduce that tax, reduce the burden of reporting to management and shift, instead too, enabling, and inspiring, and engaging people in genuine achievement.

The effort in the modern strategy execution model, the zero Waste Model, is, no time is wasted, reporting to management.

Time is made available, too.

Focus on what moves the needle for every single team across the organization.

They think about, How do we engage them in strategy execution?

Not how we asked them to report on it.

The last piece, last hallmark of zero waste, strategy execution, is, it's more intelligent.

It's digital, it's automated, and it's full stack.

So by digital, I mean, the strategy, the measures of success on that strategy, the results are progress towards then, the trajectory, our narratives about the results and our path towards them.

Those are all data, And if you think about it, the most important data in the business.

For many organizations.

You have a system of record a single source of truth for how many helpdesk tickets you have, or how many people work at the company, four supply chain status, for the sales pipeline, if a source of truth, for almost every bit of data on every process in the company, except the process of strategy execution, and it is a process.

And it is the most important data in your business.

When the strategy, the objectives, the trajectory, the barriers, the risks, the breakthroughs, our data, You can re use them to make those Smart decisions in the moment, and to make even, smarter decisions about the next iteration on the objectives and results and the next iteration on the strategy itself.

The next piece is automated.

By automating the strategy execution process and cycle, that whole operating rhythm, the strategy becomes the through line from the long range strategy to the quarter's objectives and results through the business reviews, and through those weekly, one-on-one status meetings, and, and staff reports, the status meetings, the business reviews, the weekly reporting, that is all automated.

So you reduce the operational tax, the burden of asking people to use precious time, precious attention.

Precious talent, to document their results. Instead, it's automated.

There's not a separate step or separate need to do the weekly status reports and create the 80 page slide decks for the monthly business meetings.

That's all, automated, everyone has the data they need in the moment, to make the smartest decision in the moment.

And the last, is it full stack.

It covers that all the elements of that operating rhythm, how you align on long range and short range.

Strategy.

How you drive execution through the business reviews, the weeklies, and how you get the leverage from the data on your strategy execution.

Now organizations that have shifted to zero waste strategy execution and are using a digital operating rhythm to drive their strategies, experience both quick wins and transformational change.

I'll share two examples here.

The first is from Juniper.

I started two years ago and at the point that they started working with the work board. And in this transition they had been in a five-year flat revenue trajectory, revenue growth had stalled.

And their most recent survey suggested that less than 60% of employees knew or had confidence in the strategy.

What that meant was a third of employees didn't know how, or weren't motivated to contribute to executing on that strategy.

In just two quarters of implementing that full strategy execution stack, and moving to a digital operating rhythm, in two quarters, 18% more, employees knew the strategy, and had confidence in it were motivated to contribute to it.

That's like increasing your headcount by 18% at no cost in six months.

Of skilled people who already know what your company does.

This year, as they entered 2022, still working, distributed everyone from home, 98% of employees know the strategy and how to contribute.

They're getting, effectively, 100% of their capacity focused on strategy execution.

40% more than they used to, and it's probably 40% more than their competitors.

They can go twice as fast because they're using almost twice as much of their capacity, their talent, and their time to drive their strategy execution Today.

Double digit revenue, growth, leader across the market segments that they participate in.

They are wasting no time, no talent, no attention, no resources, and no capital to execute their strategy faster and better than their peers.

Now the next example is from GH X.

When we started with them two years ago, they were not growing double digits yet.

They were spending and their business was mature at multiple business units, some complexity, some new growth products, some older products, the later stages of their other life cycle.

And they were spending quite a lot of time, quite a lot of talent, quite a lot of attention.

And complex lengthily, monthly business reviews.

We're over 50 people would sit together and read over 80 slides and at the end, the CFO, God, I have no idea how the business is doing.

We spent two weeks preparing for the meeting.

We spent extraordinary amount of money having people in the meeting and we got no value from the operating rhythm here.

We we did not get the value of our wasted time are wasted talent or wasted attention.

In two quarters as they shifted to a digital operating rhythm, as they shifted to automated monthly business reviews and full alignment across the organization on the objectives and results you were driving in a quarter, they were down to one hour monthly business reviews with the 20 people that needed to be in the decision discussion.

Absolutely zero slides.

They started saving $50,000 a month incapacity in talent.

And those talented people could apply their attention and their energy where it moved the needle, rather than reporting the needle.

Now, as they enter 2022, they've seen double digit revenue acceleration over the past 12 months.

They have higher alignment on the strategy, a lower cost to execute that strategy, and they're executing it faster than their peers.

The quick wins come in, higher capacity and lower costs, Less waste.

To report progress on strategy execution.

The transformational lens come in the form of accelerated strategy execution, zero waste, strategy execution.

I will wrap here and open it up to questions, but I'll offer three ways to learn more about zero waste strategy execution, about a faster operating rhythm in some of the modern rituals like objectives and key results.

By going to the customer journeys, you can see the ... and the Juniper stories, as well as Cisco and Microsoft and Excel, and dozens of other customers at work board dot com slash customers.

Another way to learn more is to arrange a strategy, execution, discussion, and demo of what a digital and automated approach looks like.

And a third is to engage in an assessment of your current operating rhythm and rituals, to quantify what the friction and latency are, what the waste is, and what your opportunity to accelerate strategy execution might be.

And with that, Jose, I will turn it over to you for any potential questions.

What a wonderful presentation, deandre on the on really agile strategy, planning, and execution, and It's interesting. I'll bring my camera on and again for our audience. Just know that the dangerous camera wasn't working with the interface, but do you know we? we want to move on and have her present this wonderful material to all of us. But she can hear you and the shoe. I can certainly relate any and all of your questions directly, which over during the time that we have allotted here. So please feel free to send your questions in in all through the questions segment of the goto Webinar interface. I'm looking at the commentary and notes that you make there, and that will capture as many of those as possible.

Digitally is part of the discussion, as you're presenting, is that this is, this is just wonderful.

You know, intentional, as you said, well, thought out, strategy execution. And why do so many organizations struggle with it?

What is your experience on, on why so many organizations is the concept?

Strategy and execution is not complex, but the actual doing in organizations tends to become dysfunctional over time. So curious about your assessment of the state of strategy and execution across industries, and why, what are some of the challenges to implement a system, like the one you have just described here, which, which is, which is sound logical, and you would expect them organizations who've been doing that?

So I think a couple things. one of the things that makes it hard, and where organizations struggle is they.

They got caught off guard by the changing speed of change.

So the rate with which the markets change, the rate with which technology changes, the rate with which economic conditions and climate change, it's greatly accelerated.

But for many organizations, their current strategy execution or operating rhythm is really the same one they use 10 years ago.

And 10 years ago, 15 years ago, a five year plan made total sense.

If you think about the last 2.25, you've torn up your five year plan nine times.

The speed with which our world changes right now and the speed with which our strategy needs to be responsive to new risks and new opportunities, has greatly changed.

So if we don't actually re look at the operating rhythm and say, Wait, our operating rhythm has to be as fast, as the changes in our market, changes in our universe.

You find you have a lumbering slow, disfunctional operating. And that's why intentional is the starting point.

How fast does the beat of the business need to be to operate in the worlds we operate in?

And then I would say right now, there is widespread move to digital operating Rhythm. I virtually every technology company certainly the top 10 technology companies, virtually every large health care providers, Humana, Anthem, that are the Big Pharma companies. Merc, Astra zeneca. Medtronic, I, the big insurers.

They have already moved to this new modern mechanism. And what our data shows is that, those companies that make that move to a modern digital operating rhythm outperform.

They do better than their competitors. And it's, in a sense, because they're not wasting talent that doesn't know the strategy.

And they're not wasting time on a plan that's already stale and aged out, and they're not wasting attention on the activity that doesn't add up to really moving the needle for the company.

I think we'll see a much, much accelerated shift in that same chart. How do we get to digital operating rhythm?

How do we transform our operating rhythm to be as digital as we want and as fast as we want the rest of the business to be?

Farewell farewell viral put. In ...

and another question and commentary that has surface as your ad presenting has to do with senior leadership alignment.

As you mention and you showed during your presentation, part of the kind of the old model is that people who spend this inordinate amount of time preparing, you know presentations to senior leaders. So that then, you know, decisions can be made, Strategies can be formulated, and execution can be followed up on. Any way you describe here is a much more nimble and collaborative approach.

So, um, what type of behaviors you you're looking at in this new model from senior leaders, specifically, What is the shift from, from into behaviors that you believe is necessary for implementing an Agile strategy execution system, like the one you described here?

Hmm? Hmm.

So a couple, there's behaviors from the leaders and there's behaviors from within the organization and we call those the rituals that accompany the faster rhythm, right?

So, for leaders, that part of that behavior is shifting their mindset too.

Think about how do I enable and empower teams across the organization to have the clarity they need locally to make the best contribution they can to our global strategy?

And that's the clarity is actually what's new And the that comes into play in what I'll call a ritual of a light setting and aligning objectives and key results each quarter at each team.

So, locally, we know exactly what our objectives are and exactly what results we're trying to accomplish in the next 90 days.

We see and know how that aligns to the top level objectives and key results.

The leader's behavior is driving it a rhythm in a ritual that allows that alignment to happen Encourages it to happen and then using the data on what teams are actually driving towards, to both encourage them and help course correct: where people are not really aligned on the outcomes and the direction of the company.

I think it's a shift in expectation, where you expect your team members to be data driven, and you expect them to be interested in Strategy Achievement.

And a lot of old school leaders will say things like, People don't need to know the strategy, They just need to do the work, actually to make good decisions, to move quickly, to respond to technology change. They kinda do need to know the strategy.

And so there's an opportunity to democratize strategic thinking for leaders to be more inclusive in how they bring people into understanding and contributing, and that plays directly into their ability to retain talented people who want to know the why of their work. They want to know it matters.

And if they don't know it at your company, and I'll go work at a startup where they can, where they know they move needles.

Terrific degree. I'm going to pick up a question here. That's coming from Cameron Johanna ... so, camera says, first that I loved this presentation. Thank you. This is for a statement of his question. It builds on what we just discussed here, but maybe you can go a little bit further on that.

His question is, Can you share your thoughts or observations as to how companies who have adopted this approach have being able to change their ways of working? Special as it comes to the way corporate interacts with divisions, or the way senior leadership works with rank and file, you would discuss a little bit about this already. But I'm curious about other observations you have about how does the dynamic change in communication, especially the implicit there's an implicit larger organization here where you have divisions and corporate's work across those divisions, how do you get into this rhythm? And some of the reveals that you discuss when you're in a much larger organization.

Hmm? Hmm? Yep.

In some ways, if you're in a much larger organization, it's actually much more important.

There are many, many, many more layers, And many more silos for your strategy to go to die.

And so the size and scale of an organization is actually yeah, at odds with its speed.

So if you are a large organization that wants to move with speed and agility and cohesion, this is actually more important, not less important. And you see that in who our customers are, right? Intel and Wal-Mart are not small.

They are enormous.

The, we did a benchmark study last year of 2021 financial performance across organizations that had moved to a digital operating rhythm in 20 20 So they at the beginning of the pandemic, had already started to make the move. In 20 21 were broadly.

Strategy execution stack, digital operating rhythm, alignment through all the teams in their org And what we found, and this is most important, because this is why action makes sense here.

What we found is that companies that had made the move there, all of 2021 grew revenues 13% faster than their direct competitors.

Their revenue per head was 1.7 times better than their direct competitors.

There, we're generating almost twice the revenue per employee as their competitors were.

And they'd for a company, had a thousand. people, had say 200 people who had previously been dedicated to management reporting.

Those 200 people got to shift back to meaningful contribution to strategy achievement itself.

The first reason to change, the first kind of, how do you start, where do you start is recognize that you're at a competitive disadvantage.

If your organization operates slowly and in A misaligned way, right?

I think that the quick wins aren't come quite quickly.

So being intentional about, let's start, let's get aligned on outcomes for this part of the organization.

Let's cut over to digital, and the third month, you can quickly get some wins on the board, quickly recover 10% or 20% of capacity, quickly save 50 or $60,000 a month.

Then you do like everything else you iterate and improve every quarter on what's learned. I build the muscle notion, build that muscle memory, and continue to gain velocity to more transformational lens.

One quarter at a time, continuous iterative improvement.

Terrific. Terrific. Digitally I have another interesting question here from the audience related to innovation. How does this approach helps or hinders innovation in an organization? What are your thoughts on that?

I think it's actually crucial to innovation in two ways. one is accelerating innovation and the other is unlocking it deeper in the organization.

And innovation that is misaligned with that direction of the organization is probably not that innovative.

Me, when we think about the objectives and key results methodology that ritual, it's a method for teams to talk about, literally what's great look like.

What are the best possible outcomes. What value can we create. What does great value look like.

And, when every team is having that conversation, not the, what should we do conversation, but actually, what would be great conversation. What are the outcomes.

We, only we can create, they come up with different ideas. They start talking about.

What can only be great is if we could write and they imagine a bit differently, that's a different conversation than is traditional, where organizations talk about, well, what are the priorities?

And you get into an opinion contest on the priorities in this one.

It's, what are we trying to achieve as an organization? What are the outcomes that are success in the organization?

And then what are our best outcomes in the next 90 days?

And there's a focus on awesome and great and best, not minimum.

What we know for sure we can do are the least, but actually the most.

The second is the OK, our ritual is actually measuring to learn not measuring to punish and great innovation is iterative hypothesis driven and we use data about our hypothesis to make our next set of choices.

And you can build that mindset that thinking that way of operating into literally every team's habits across the organization.

Love that. We Deidre and I like best friends for Life. Bazel never finishes, discusses the theater. That's fantastic, and, of course, confirmation bias, certainly on my, and that there's no doubt about it, because, what you said is, music to my ears. As a matter of fact, my next presentation, we're going to be reviewing over one thousand successful digital transformations, because people like to talk about failures. But I want to talk about what makes some successful. And, by the way, that the most digital transformations will fail, and specifically, when it comes to innovation, I will discuss one of the organizations that I lead, where we had over 2000 innovations on an annual basis, with more than a billion dollars anybody, for the company. And how did that happen? in that happen, largely because of systems, like what degree is explained here to us? So, you see, for those of you hanging out and see my presentation X, you're gonna see a lot of similarities between the practical approaches to discussing, and the items that I have loved that.

So, I'll finish here with a question about employee morale and engagement.

How can you share any stories about how this, this approach, with Agile strategy execution, improves employee morale because of this, new empowerment?

And simply put, I think, people come to work to do something that matters.

And objectives and key results are vocabulary for describing what we're doing and why it matters, and for understanding how that fits into the big scheme of the company.

And doing something that matters doesn't mean a to-do list, right? It means understanding the value we create and why that's important in the context of the company, mission of the organization.

And I think if you don't have a vocabulary that enables teams to describe the value, they create and understand its importance, You don't have a bunch of people thinking that. their work is really valuable You have a bunch of people wondering if it is because they don't have a language.

They don't have a syntax.

You don't have a structure, a method, a set of rituals, behaviors, then enable them to do that.

And when teams set out to achieve ambitious things and make progress, and when they have a ritual of each quarter learning from their outcomes and celebrating their victories, they have more learnings, they have more outcomes, and they have more victories.

And I think that's at the heart of engagement, engagement, and what engagement in the mission of the organization, engagement and achievement, inclusion in achievement.

And I think o.k.r.s an incredibly powerful ritual and method for that.

What What a way to wrap this session up. You know, the discipline of strategy execution that you discuss here is phenomenal.

And discipline ultimately, consistency with purpose and you have provided us with a great roadmap on how you can be chronically consistent with our purpose in the organizations while making sure that every activity that we that we engage on is strategically aligned with the purpose and objectives. So, thank you so much Deidre, for sharing your wisdom and expertise with our global audience today.

Thank you, has a pleasure to be here.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

That was, that was ..., who is the CEO and co-founder of work board. Please connect with her, follow her work and the incredible, in fact, that she's having of our company, is having. On, on a cross industry organizations. You can find her. I think she said, ... dot com is our e-mail. You can also see her direct link, because I have her on the list of speakers on the posting on LinkedIn, under my name, so you can go at that post on LinkedIn, and you can check her directly, your profile, and send a connection request, if appropriate.

So we are pausing now, and I'm going to come back at the top of the hour with the final presentation of the day, which will be a benchmark presentation that I want to share with you, about the principles and approaches from Great Enduring organizations, and I call it Global Disruption, How great leaders and organizations, conker, culture, business, and digital transformations, is based on the bench March of and Practical Insights for more than one thousand award winning organizations on excellence, innovation, and culture business, and digital transformation. So, how do they blend discipline innovation methods with elements of venture capitalists, and crowd sourcing, and collaborative leadership to deliver rapid and sustainable improvements and innovations in any industry? So, it's an exclusive presentation here for the digital workplace transformation live, and, and I hope to see you at the top of the hour to go over that. Thank you for now.