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I had the privilege of being on the Fort Podcast with Chris Powers last week. Chris is an excellent interviewer and we covered a lot of ground including scaling-up, organizational design, and where a leader can create the most leverage to get and sustain business momentum. Listen on:
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Cheers,

Lex

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Does your business need an anti-chaos officer? And what in the heck is an anti-chaos officer anyway? I’m referring to a senior leadership role that is dedicated to reducing the internal friction, noise, and chaos that naturally emerges across and between functions and whose mission is to enable the entire business to execute faster and smarter as a whole.

This role goes by many different names and interpretations and is usually splintered across multiple organizational functions. As a consequence, even though it can deliver tremendous value and leverage, it is still widely misunderstood. Additionally, the need for it is unrecognized in most businesses today. I am dedicating this article to clear up these misconceptions and to help you design and implement this very impactful position in your business. You’ll be very glad that you did. Let’s get to it.

What is this Anti-Chaos Officer Role Exactly?

Half the battle of understanding this role is defining it. Seriously. It is usually fragmented across the organization and comes in many different flavors and job titles. In my organizational structure work, I usually call this the Business Alignment Office. But this term hasn’t really helped me to make this position easier to communicate and teach. I recently heard a recruiter tell one of my clients, “Oh, it’s like an Anti-Chaos Officer!” and I laughed at the clever angle, which is what inspired me to write this article. Sometimes this role gets conflated with a Program Management Office or even a Project Management Office but it is more than these. Obviously, a role like a Chief Operating Officer or an equivalent has elements of bringing order, stability and throughput to the organization, but that isn’t the role I’m describing either.

So what is it? This is an organizational linchpin role that drives the coordination, management, and execution of all major cross-functional processes, projects, and initiatives. Its purpose is to identify, plan, coordinate, and communicate those high-impact, cross-functional problems and initiatives that improve metrics and decision-making, accelerate throughput, improve quality, and enable scalability of the entire organization. Its #1 mandate is to seek out cross-functional entropy and — by working together with other impacted functions — bring forth shared insights, speed, quality, and performance. Then find the next cross-functional opportunity and repeat.

When I was the CEO of Commission Junction, I blindly stumbled into this role and quickly realized the positive impact it can have. At the time, I was fortunate to have on staff a very smart and talented individual named Wade Crang. Wade had an MBA and an advanced math degree and had worked for several years has a consultant at a Big 5 consulting firm. I remember hiring him even though we didn’t really have a well-defined role for him to perform at the […]

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We’ve all been encouraged to delegate more. We’ve also all had the experience of delegating in the past only to have things turn into a total fricking disaster. Most management writing is on how to delegate better. I want to explain when, why, and how you should NOT delegate at all and how to better educate your team about why you’ve made those delegation decisions.

What inspired this article is a CEO friend of mine who recently completed a 360 degree performance review between herself and her leadership team. Can you take a guess at what most of the ‘things to improve’ feedback was? You got it. “Needs to do a better job of delegating.” “Tries to do too much herself.” “Gets too involved in the details sometimes.” I see the same scenario often with my clients.

Some of the feedback my friend received was valid. But some of it was not because, in this instance, she doesn’t fully trust in the abilities of the subordinates who were giving the feedback. She’s not wrong. How can you delegate a mission-critical project to someone whose capabilities you don’t fully trust?

There’s a mental model I like called the Conviction-Consequence matrix that helps to clarify to yourself and to others what projects you’re delegating and which ones you’re not and why. I picked up the outline for this model in the book Super Thinking, where the authors originally attribute the model to venture capitalist Keith Rabois. I’ve put my own spin on it:

Do It Yourself are those projects or situations that you have high conviction over and that also have very high consequences, positive and negative, to you and the organization.

I just love the use of the term conviction here. Think about the things in your life that you have high conviction over. Notice that you tend to be very capable in these areas already. You likely also have some significant experience dealing with similar situations to this one in the past. Ideally, you also have deep understanding of the first principles that guide the outcomes in this area.

However, there are also times as an entrepreneur when you can’t actually explain why you have such high conviction. You just know that you know, even if you’re not sure exactly why you know. True conviction can sometimes be a purely innate sense but it is still one that is hard to argue with.

Delegate to An Expert refers to those projects or situations where you have low conviction yourself but there are definitely high consequences for you and the organization. These are the projects or situations that you delegate to an expert, either to an internal staff member or […]

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Casper the online mattress company – sorry, eh, I meant to say “the sleep transformation company” – recently announced its IPO. From the S-1:

As the wellness equation increasingly evolves to include sleep, the business of sleep is growing and evolving into what we call the Sleep Economy. We are helping to accelerate this transformation. Our mission is to awaken the potential of a well-rested world, and we want Casper to become the top-of-mind brand for best-in-class products and experiences that improve how we sleep…

We believe great brands win over the long-term and have the ability to change the culture around them. We have endeavored to build a brand that is genuine, trustworthy, and approachable, as well as fun and playful. Through our investment in a sophisticated and integrated marketing strategy, we engage consumers across the entire consumer journey, from our iconic public transit advertising campaigns, to our “Napmobiles” and experiential retail store concepts, to our category-leading social media presence. We see the Casper brand as an immeasurably valuable asset that we are utilizing to help capture a large share of the Sleep Economy.

When you read this, does it make you want to go online and buy one of their mattresses? Me neither.

Does it make you roll your eyes a bit? Yep, me too.

But does it do what the message is targeted to achieve – to speak to the financial community and gather interest and excitement for the upcoming IPO? I don’t think it does.

In fact, I think this message creates more harm than good because the brand is speaking with two voices. One to its consumers through its “brand focus” and one to its investors through its “investor focus.”

Great brands don’t do this. Great brands speak to the core customer’s perspective with one voice and one message to all stakeholders.

So what should Casper say to the investment community instead? I don’t claim to be a communications expert but it’s some variation of what really matters to the core customer: “Casper helps people have a great night sleep.” Period.

Why is this the core message? Because the core customer defines the polestar for all other company stakeholders, activities, and initiatives. If the head of the company muddles this message and focus, then they muddle everything else too.

“But wait a minute,” you might be asking, “what about meeting investor needs? Prospective IPO investors will certainly want more color on the company’s customer acquisition costs or gross margin or strategy, so shouldn’t they also have a message tailored to the investment community?” Nope. From the top of the company down, it should actually have the same message when speaking to the investment community as they do to all stakeholders, internal and external: “Our focus is on helping […]

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When I’m building a new organizational structure with a leadership team, someone usually makes this observation: “In this new structure, who actually owns the customer?” Before responding, I first try to get a shared definition so I’ll ask them to clarify: “Great question. What do you mean specifically by ‘own the customer’?”

They tend to hem and haw before replying something like, “You know, own the customer… a single point in the organization that knows everything about the customer, that is accountable for the overall customer experience, makes product decisions, and that champions the customers needs.” They might then share with me that in their old structure, this role was held by the VP of Product or Marketing or Customer Success. “In this new structure,” they’ll add, “it’s unclear who owns the customer.”

OK, now we’re getting somewhere. Here’s the answer:

In a well-designed organization, no single role should “own” the customer. Instead, the entire structure must be designed to acquire and serve the right customers now and over time. Every role in the structure has a part to play in accomplishing that mission.

Put another way, there are some key steps in the customer journey: from acquisition to on-boarding, to engagement, to support, to the design and maintenance of the products and services customers use, and so on. Each of these distinct steps in the customer journey actually requires a different mindset, skill set, and focus. If the structure were designed so that one role is accountable for all aspects of the customer journey, some very predictable problems will emerge because the organization is attempting to consolidate too many conflicting and competing needs under one role.

What kinds of problems? They exist on a spectrum in relation to the competing demands of short-range vs. long-range, efficiency vs. effectiveness, and autonomy vs. control. You can read more about these competing demands in Top 10 Signs Its Time To Change Your Org Structure. How those problems show up in your particular business will depend a lot on the skills, style and interests of the individual leader as well as the lifecycle stage of your business.

For example, if the leader who is supposed to “own” the customer is more sales-oriented, then you can expect to see a lot more focus on customer acquisitions and a lot less on customer engagement and retention. If the leader is more process- and quality-oriented, you should expect to see a lot of great product plans but very little throughput. In other words, some segments of the cycle will thrive and others will suffer.

Or, if your business is growing rapidly in the early Nail It stage, for example, you will see a lot of firefighting by the team to meet customer needs, with no one […]