Advice for CEOs

In Doug Tatum’s book, No Man's Land: Where Growing Companies Fail, he describes a set of symptoms that indicate that a company is in No Man’s Land. Some of these include; working in, instead of on the business; working harder and longer hours but not getting the desired results; managers showing signs of “being over their heads”, with cash tight even if the company is basically profitable. Concerns about meeting payroll and other obligations; losing touch with your customers; quality problems with the products and services you sell; deteriorating service levels and lead times getting longer - all these combine to make you and the organization feel that you are in a state of chaos. These are tell-tale signs that your company is in No Man’s Land.

I had the privilege to hear Admiral Vern Clark, former Chief of Naval Operations, recently as he spoke to a group of over 100 local business people. Admiral Clark is a fascinating individual, a humble hero driven by character and vision. He had me at "a-ten-hut" with his stories such as the night, as captain of a destroyer he led his crew to prevent crashing on a reef in the midst of a Class 5 hurricane.

Middle market CEO’s and entrepreneurs, like other business people and executives, are prone to believe in a one word mantra: “execution.” They are inclined to put their faith in what has been called: “Middle” Leadership - the view that a company’s strategy and goals are basically right. If the business strategy or even the entire company fails, they are inclined to point the finger of blame at the way it was executed.

In the first part of this article, I discussed the sense many business owners have that “my company is different.” Many times CEO’s who belong to the “this company is different” school of thought ask me: since I don’t have experience in their particular industry, how could I be of help? My response is to ask them whether, in view of their industry knowledge and that of their top team, they might be at risk of static thinking.

Harvard Business School states that over 90% of strategies fail. The authors describe in their study that “the ability to execute strategy was more important than the strategy itself.” Failure to execute not only lowers performance, it also prevents a company from breaking through a perilous growth inflection point. We call that point No Man’s Land.