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The Right Structure for Your Business Stage

What is the right organizational structure for the current and emerging lifecycle stage of your core business and any business units? Using the Organizational Physics Strategy Map as a guide, this video shows that:

  • A Pilot It stage initiative requires very limited structure.
  • A Nail It stage initiative benefits from a functional structure.
  • A Scale It stage initiative requires an evolving structure (based on the functions defined in the Nail It stage).
  • A Milk It stage structure requires making a break or escape from the legacy structure.

Additional Resources Referenced in this Video:
Buy the book Organizational Physics (best book for understanding lifecycle strategy)
Take the Top-Level OKRs Strategy Survey
Buy the book Designed to Scale

By |2022-03-09T22:08:07-08:00March 8th, 2022|Articles|Comments Off on The Right Structure for Your Business Stage

Design Controls Behavior

Design controls behavior. If you want new business behaviors, change the the organizational structure The 6 Rules of Structure provide visibility into key underlying polarities at work within every business. A key idea is to not treat polarities as problems to be solved. Polarities (e.g., short-range vs. long-range, efficiency vs. effectiveness, control vs. autonomy) must be harnessed to create the right amount of tension in the business for sustained strategic execution.
Buy the book Designed to Scale on Amazon.

By |2022-03-06T10:04:27-08:00March 6th, 2022|Articles|Comments Off on Design Controls Behavior

The 6 Rules of Structure


There are 6 Rules of Structure to follow when designing a scalable business structure. They are:
1. If the strategy or lifecycle stage changes, change the structure.
2. Don’t allow short-range functions to control long-range ones.
3. Don’t allow efficiency functions to control effectiveness ones.
4. Don’t allow centralized control to overpower decentralized autonomy.
5. Put people into roles where they can focus and thrive.
6. Process brings structure alive.

Buy the Book Designed to Scale on Amazon.

By |2022-03-03T15:08:22-08:00March 3rd, 2022|Articles|Comments Off on The 6 Rules of Structure

Introducing the Top-Level OKRs Strategy Survey

I’ve recently made available a powerful new tool for setting strategy. It’s called the Top-Level OKRs Strategy Survey. It relies on lifecycle theory to help you quickly align a Leadership Team on the right top-level objectives and key results (OKRs).

If you are planning to do a strategy refresh, I highly recommend this approach. I suggest that you launch this tool 3 to 4 weeks prior to your strategic planning offsite and use the data as inputs for setting the right strategy. You can find out everything you need to know here.

Take the tool for a free 30-day test drive and let me know how it is working out for you. I guarantee it will help you set the right next-stage strategy, one based on the actual lifecycle stage of each business unit. It will also create improved strategic clarity, alignment, and buy-in across your entire company.

To your success,

Lex

By |2022-02-23T08:40:27-08:00February 23rd, 2022|Articles|Comments Off on Introducing the Top-Level OKRs Strategy Survey

Fort Capital 2021 Year in Review Podcast

Imagine if you could listen to a recording from last year of you and your co-founder discussing the state of your business and your plans for the coming year. What would the conversation have sounded like a year ago? What were you thinking then? What were your blind spots that you recognize now? And how would it compare to a recording from this year?

The reason I’m asking is that this recent episode of the Fort with Chris Powers does just that. Chris and his business partner Jaxon Baxter conduct a real-time year-in-review live. It’s really rare to capture something like this and it is worth listening to.

I collaborated with Chris and Jason last year to deploy Organizational Physics in their real estate management company, Fort Capital. For Capital is scaling like gangbusters and Chris and Jason are two of the most savvy and values-driven entrepreneurs you’ll meet. Their no-holds-barred conversation is a great real-world example of the power of:

  • Getting a fresh perspective on the business
  • Designing the structure from first principles (not around people)
  • Recognizing the 4 Quadrants of structure and the risks of assigning conflicting accountabilities across quadrants
  • The importance of designing the business flywheel and making prioritization decisions based on the spokes that need the greatest focus
  • How to use the organizational structure to avoid execution bottlenecks
  • How to use machine learning to streamline the top of the sales funnel
  • How to scale dramatically without adding more people
  • The real rapport between Chris and Jason—two smart individuals who have complementary PSIU styles.

I didn’t know that Chris and Jason were going to discuss Organizational Physics and it was fun and humbling for me to hear them speak about their experience and new perspectives in their own words. I hope you’ll enjoy it too.

By |2023-01-16T09:13:33-08:00January 26th, 2022|Articles|Comments Off on Fort Capital 2021 Year in Review Podcast

The Rocket


There have been a lot of exciting developments in private space travel this month. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, through their respective companies, are all making consistent and visible progress towards developing space-based private enterprise. I’m sure that much of the social media world is rolling their eyes at “billionaires and their toys,” but regardless, it is amazing to witness what humans can accomplish over time when they have the commitment, vision, and resources to make it possible. Blue Origin’s motto, Gradatim Ferociter, meaning “step by step ferociously,” captures the spirit very well.

The picture above captures the spirit of progressive innovation. The image on the left is the Wright Brother’s flight at Kitty Hawk. The image on the right is Neil Armstrong’s moon walk. Without looking up the dates, if you had to guess, how much time would you say it took humanity to go from the first “airplane” flight to putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth?

….

Just 66 years! Totally bonkers, right? It leaves me wondering what the next 66 years will hold for humanity. In some areas we’ve made mind-boggling innovations and progress and in other areas, we seem stuck in the dark ages.

So my question to you, as a visionary entrepreneur yourself, is this: What’s your rocket? What’s the vision of your company and how will its success help to up-level the whole? And critically—because vision without execution is just a dream—are you currently organized to ensure that your business accomplishes its mission and without compromising its core values? And even more critically, as the leader, how are you thinking about the organizational design challenge as your company scales up?

To get a sense for what I mean, and how to think about this challenge, I’d like you to imagine that you are in the shoes (spaceboots?) of an Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Richard Branson and you are attempting to launch and scale a space-based company. Now, this analogy may seem very far removed from your own business today, but just humor me. The challenges faced by every expansion-stage entrepreneur are fundamentally the same, regardless of the vision or business model. And the mindset used to solve these challenges successfully is also the same.

Launch Day

It’s launch day. Out on the tarmac the rocket sits, gleaming in the morning sun, pointed towards the heavens, with its payload ready to blast into orbit. As the founder and CEO of Rockets R Us, you’ve got a lot riding on this. It’s your company’s inaugural commercial launch and you await the event with nervous anticipation. As the countdown clock commences, you can’t help but reflect on what it took to reach this point. The launch coordinator announces over your headset, […]

By |2021-07-13T19:19:53-07:00July 13th, 2021|Articles|Comments Off on The Rocket

Introducing the Entropy Survey

Does operational excellence matter to you?

If so, then I’d like to introduce you to a powerful new tool called the Organizational Physics Entropy Survey. The Entropy Survey allows you to survey a cross-functional team to discover a company’s most important internal improvement points and create an action plan to fix them. Then you can track the team’s progress at driving and sustaining operational excellence over time.

For over a decade, I have relied on this same tool as a linchpin in my strategic alignment and organizational design consulting practice. I have used it with several hundred companies. I know it can be transformative for two reasons:

  1. Many clients who completed my initial program continue to use this same survey every year, as part of their own strategic planning and alignment process.
  2. The survey allows the team to track its progress at reducing entropy over time. This way we can actually measure it working!

It’s a powerful tool and is like nothing else out there. I’m just now making the Entropy Survey available to other coaches and CEOs who would also value the improved ability to:

  • Gather and align diverse perspectives
  • Solve problems at the root cause
  • Improve organizational velocity and scalability
  • Measure improvements over time
  • Create a successful, resilient, and agile organization

“The Entropy Survey is a revolutionary change. Not simply an incremental move, but a massive transformative change over the traditional SWOT Analysis.”

– Paul Cronin, Managing Director, Cornerstone3 Inc.

If you’re potentially interested in a powerful approach to organizational development like the one I’m describing, then I’d like to invite you to register for free, kick the tires, and see how it works. If you give it a sincere try, then you’ll quickly understand why it can make such a positive impact in growing a business.

Click here to learn more and register for free  —>

By |2021-06-15T10:06:59-07:00June 15th, 2021|Articles|Comments Off on Introducing the Entropy Survey

Lex Sisney on the Fort Podcast with Chris Powers

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:
Apple 
Spotify
YouTube

Cheers,

Lex

By |2021-05-18T01:28:36-07:00April 26th, 2021|Articles|Comments Off on Lex Sisney on the Fort Podcast with Chris Powers

Does Your Business Need an Anti-Chaos Officer?

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán at Pexels.

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 […]

By |2021-05-18T01:35:11-07:00December 6th, 2020|Articles|Comments Off on Does Your Business Need an Anti-Chaos Officer?

Delegation Strategies: When NOT to Delegate

Modified Conviction-Conseqence Matrix Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels.

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 […]

By |2021-05-18T01:37:52-07:00March 2nd, 2020|Articles|Comments Off on Delegation Strategies: When NOT to Delegate

Great Brands Have Only One Message

Photo by bruce mars from Pexels

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 […]

By |2021-05-18T01:38:28-07:00January 15th, 2020|Articles|Comments Off on Great Brands Have Only One Message

Who Should Own the Customer?

Photo by Mike from Pexels

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 […]

By |2023-02-21T10:22:01-08:00December 5th, 2019|Articles|Comments Off on Who Should Own the Customer?
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