Reed Deshler > Quotes

“Likewise, the systems in a winning organization must be better than its competitors at everything that affects its chosen point of differentiation. Tinkering in only one area is not enough.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The other caution has to do with coordinating what work is phased out as a result of lower staffing levels. Leaders often let any such phasing out proceed of its own accord because they have faith that when they eliminate layers in the organizational chart or increase leadership spans of control, people who feel the increased workload will wisely and naturally eliminate tasks that are non-value added or of reduced competitive importance. But this faith is misplaced if employees are not clear about the relative value of work or what the strategic trade-offs should be. If they do not know what work to eliminate, they may not eliminate any at all and instead pass it on to someone else. In this way the organization chart is like a square of jiggly jelly. If you squeeze the jelly from the top and the bottom, it is going to squelch out the sides, and if you squeeze from the sides, it is going to squelch out the top and the bottom. Increasing spans of control—giving leaders more responsibility—may soon result in more layers (for example, one firm created “senior technician” roles for technicians to fill as intermediaries for busy managers). Decreasing layers of the organizational chart may increase spans of control (for example, another company eliminated a layer of managers but then hired a couple of new directors to handle the additional workload when all the reports were reassigned to the next highest management level). The total headcount dollars are never reduced, just reapportioned.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Our colleague Adam Anderson calls this marriage of strategic planning and organization alignment liquid design. The term indicates that large enterprises can and should be in a constant state of change as divisions or groups within divisions are continuously renewed and realigned. In this approach to planning, profit center heads are masters of launching and leading organization alignment. They report on misalignments within their divisions and ensure new processes, structures, or other practices are funded or existing ones adjusted to produce the strategic capabilities required by the business.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Can your leadership team identify your trade-offs? It is often easy to see trade-offs in other companies, but can you articulate your own? There are no optical drives in any Apple Airs or data ports in iPads. Has your enterprise similarly been able to say no to your equivalent of optical drives and data ports? Apple may lose some customers who want an integrated DVD player. They are okay with that. Starbucks may lose some customers on a tight budget who are in a big hurry. They are okay with that.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The capabilities that have brought firms laurels in the past will sabotage them in the future if they cannot supplement them or replace them with new sets of organizing choices that produce fresh new capabilities.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“What alignment leaders do is thoughtfully create and champion organizing choices that enable performance. They find formal ways to embody the yeses of their strategy as well as the nos. They have the fortitude to stand up for the deployment of new practices and also to identify and retire extant practices that are no longer strategically expedient.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“When strategy is adjusted, leadership teams must scrutinize the work of the organization and discern what new or existing activities and touch points will actually deliver differentiation in the marketplace. Not what activities are familiar old friends that have previously contributed to success. Not what activities are headed by the most charismatic or brilliant people in your company. Not what activities are considered "best in class.” Not what activities are prescribed by the myriad of institutions that inform the education and professional certification of technical experts you have hired. Not what activities are legislated. Just those activities that will help you win because they set you apart from everyone else.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“alignment is as much about the process of discussing options, weighing benefits and risks, and reaching an agreement as a leadership team on how best to design the organization to achieve marketplace distinction as it is about the resulting choices. Leaders need to dialogue together to generate creative momentum and climb the path that heads toward new ways of thinking.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“An aligned organization is impossible to achieve if the strategy is not clear, because strategy is the endpoint to which the rest of the organization is directed. When leaders set about to align their organizations, they often discover that they are not resolved about their strategy. They may be very clear about their financial targets. They may have precise numbers representing their growth plans. They may be sure of the capital initiatives and other initiatives they have planned to pursue in the short- or long-term. But if your team cannot exactly articulate why customers choose you over others—or in the case of nonprofit organizations, what your beneficiaries rely on you to do that no one else does for them—then you are not yet capable of alignment. Everyone on the executive team and beyond should be able to state in explicit terms how you intend to be unique in customers' eyes.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The aim for competitive work will be to make it as effective as possible, reengineering it if necessary and possibly spending more to deliver a better product or customer experience as the strategy directs. The aim for non-competitive work will be to make it as efficient as possible, ensuring it hums along steadily without unnecessarily consuming resources that could be used by work that has a strong marketplace upside.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Jobs despised slide decks because they could disguise the presenter’s lack of knowledge or muffle his raw opinions and analysis. To keep all these meetings vital, Jobs dispensed with formal presentations and instead insisted on long, lively debates where people from different perspectives owned up to and hashed out their disagreements.5”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The set of upsides and downsides that characterize your organization have an expiration date.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Leadership groups need to jointly articulate their value propositions, struggle together to define trade-offs, and haggle over what work in the organization is and is not of the greatest marketplace value. It is in these difficult but exhilarating discussions that thinking changes and harmonizes at the leadership level.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“If you are committed to bringing about lasting organizational change, then you need to focus on this task for a set block of time—at least three to five intense days. And those days only include the time with your executive team when you are in the conference room or off-site making the first sweeping pass.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Though leadership behavior and organizing choices can affect and mold culture, it is difficult to establish culture directly. Leaders cannot implement a new "shared belief" simply by announcing it. They can, however, cultivate a desired belief or value by modeling behaviors consistent with that belief, by basing new priorities and programs on that belief, by telling stories that showcase that belief, and by aligning organizing choices to drive the desired culture.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The trade-offs selected by your strategic team must be clear and explicit. They must be cascaded to every person in the company to guide the yes-no decisions made daily in work routines and at customer touch points. Anyone who chooses tasks, spends money, or speaks to a customer should know the big yeses and the big nos.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The folks who make up the workforce crave simplicity at work just as much as consumers crave simplicity in what they purchase. But it is an irrefutable reality that someone along the value chain is going to have to do new work to absorb added complexity. Enter Building Block 7: Absorb complexity for your”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Strategy is about the future; capabilities are about the past. Understanding the delta between your current capabilities and the needed capabilities is the crux of organization alignment. You need to select which existing capabilities will be augmented and which will be attenuated or discontinued altogether. Developing new capabilities takes time, and backing off from old capabilities takes courage”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Continuous organization alignment should feel natural and comfortable, just one of the ongoing activities that come with running a company. People should be able to continue to run the business while engaged in alignment; indeed, alignment should feel like the everyday innovative work of responding to changes in the environment and in the customer. Thus, rather than coveting a perfect design that never has to change again, alignment leaders should be helping their organizations strengthen the muscle of ongoing organization alignment.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“To deepen alignment across specialties, the Apple organizational structure was very different from that of most other firms. There were no product divisions that were their own profit centers. “We run one P&L for the company,” said operations head Tim Cook (who became CEO after Jobs’s death).8 Thus, divisions did not compete against each other for customers or worry about "cannibalization.” This proved a huge competitive advantage when Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes. Rival Sony, rich in assets that could have given Apple a run for its money, was undermined by their organization structure, which was divided into profit centers that drove focus on product lines but hampered collaboration across these lines. Sony’s music division and their consumer electronics division were never able to successfully join forces to compete against Apple. Conversely, at Apple, all departments could celebrate a sale, whether a consumer chose to download music through their iPod or iPhone, or send emails using an iPad or MacBook.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“When you change your strategy, it is likely that the organization as a whole or in part will need to develop new capabilities. A strategic capability (which we will mostly refer to as a capability) is simply the power and ability to deploy a strategy; a capability is made up of dozens of processes, structures, systems, human resource practices, skilled people, and values interacting throughout an organization.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Your ability to compete lies in the activities you choose to do and how you choose to resource them.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The second-effort pulse of organization alignment work—to move down the road in the new direction—involves organizing choices that are more detailed, more process-oriented, and that involve managers and contributors who actually perform the work that needs to change. The scope narrows to individual functions, processes, departments, and teams. It is often led by third- and fourth-level leaders in their new seats but can be carried out at any level. Because the focus is tighter, we call this micro alignment. Because it is in this pulse that the day-to-day work routines, jobs, decision-making realities, information tools, reward systems, and other policies really take on new forms, another term that describes this level of alignment is operational alignment. Micro design is absolutely the real work of mid-level leaders because it is essentially innovative and operational in nature.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Spending where you shouldn’t prevents you from investing where you should.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Offerings that help people bypass the clutter are often called solutions. Solution-based offerings bundle goods and services together so the customer does not have to spend the time sorting through individual items, making choices about which are preferable, and assembling them for the job to be done.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“A group of leaders with an intimate understanding of the marketplace can systematically reconceive their organization in three to five days.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“As Harvard Business School professor and author Clayton Christensen has taught, successful companies will get pushed aside if they do not hearken to the threat of disruptive innovations and adjust their strategies in response. We would emphasize that strategic change is not what’s hard. What’s really hard is organizational change to accommodate strategie change. Processes, structures, measures, information systems, people systems, continuous improvement protocols, and cultural beliefs all must coalesce around a new strategic idea, or it will never deliver the desired results.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Part of their approach involved making structure change to group competitive work more tightly together and separate it from noncompetitive work. The mind-set required by the two workforces is different—one to strive toward differentiation and excellence, one to aim for extraordinary efficiency. Non-competitive work is not necessarily less important—many non-strategic tasks, such as payroll, sales administration, and network operations, are absolutely crucial for running the business. But non-competitive work tends to be more transactional in nature. It often feels more urgent as well. And herein lies the problem. If the same product expert who answers demanding administrative questions and labors to fill out complicated compliance paperwork is also responsible for helping to craft unique, integrated solutions for clients, the whole client experience—the competitive work—could easily fall apart. Prying apart these two different types of activities so different teams can perform them ensures that vital competitive work is not engulfed by less competitive tasks.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Organization alignment efforts are not complete until micro alignment choices are put into action.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The executives lasered in on the key work that they believed would create growth, and then they pinpointed other work where they could tighten efficiencies and perhaps even decrease their performance to par without impacting customers. That’s right: they pegged the areas of the organization that could be average. That is where they planned to cut costs by eliminating or streamlining workflows and reducing head count.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works