So we worked up a new process to begin in the fall of 2001. It was a radical change for all involved. Previously, a president would come into a review meeting with a lengthy PowerPoint presentation, which captured all the material that he or she wanted to share. The president would go through the deck, slide by slide, revealing the material to the mass audience in real time. We changed the meeting completely. It went from a formal presentation (by the business to management) to a dialogue focused on a very few critical strategic issues identified in advance. Whatever strategic issues the president wanted to discuss were delivered in writing in advance of the strategy review meeting. The senior team would review the submission and select the issues it wished to discuss (or propose alternative points of discussion).

That’s what turned the strategic agenda into the strategic plan that got presented to the board about a hundred fifty days after he started. I use the term plan a little loosely,” Tamke editorializes, “because that strategic plan was kind of heavy on tactical things that we were going to get done in the next year and a bit lighter on the strategic direction, with more of the blanks yet to be filled in. But they did get filled in during the course of the next year, through updates that Gary did with the organization.

We found this initiation of a big new strategy push at this year three to four juncture again and again in the journeys of the most transformative CEOs. Mary Barra took charge at GM in 2014, and in her first two years largely focused on urgent shot-term issues. She had to steer the company through the tumult of a scandal that broke just three weeks after she steeped into the job: GM had failed to disclose that ignition switches in some models were causing cars to suddenly shut off, resulting in the deaths of more than 120 people.

Hubert Joly’s timing in announcing a next-era strategy emphasized how the mindset he’d developed, of thinking of his career in terms of chapters, helped him seize the day to explicitly launch a next-phase strategy for Bust Buy. “The length of my chapters is typically three or four years,” he told us, “because it takes a few years to get where you’re going. Then you pause and say, Where do we want to go next?

Notes

Chapter Four: Reinvention

1. Rose Gailey, Ian Johnston, and Andre LeSueur, “Aligning Culture with the Bottom Line: How Companies Can Accelerate Progress,” Hedrick & Struggles, www.heidrick.com/en/insights/culture-shaping/aligning-culture-eith-the-bottom-line-how-companies-can-accelerate-progress#RefN2