Sherpa Alliance

If Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford, can do it, you sure as heck can!  Hold a morning meeting (or a daily huddle at some other time of day) that is.  As reported in an article in this week’s BusinessWeek Magazine (Ford’s Savior, March 16th, 2009):

 "When Mulally first instituted the weekly Business Plan Review system, it was viewed not only as a pain in the neck but also like playing poker with all you cards showing.  In November [2008] Mulally decided that the dire business conditions, and Ford’s new ability to react to rapidly changing circumstances, warranted daily meetings with the global team.  Insiders say these led Ford to strike a new deal with the union or retiree health care before GM and Chrysler, and helped it price discounts and boost market share four months in a row".

That’s a CEO of a $170 Billion revenue company, going through more turbulent times than anyone could have imagined, holding daily meetings of his global team!  My guess is that there aren’t many of you reading this who run a business bigger or more global or going through more turbulent times than that?  So what’s your excuse?

I know, I know - a morning meeting (or daily huddle at some other time of day) will be unpopular and seems embarassingly simple - but there again some things are so elegantly simple (Simplicity & Complexity), that they are alomost embarassingly so, which is why most people don’t do them!

• Not too embarassing for Alan Mulally - my guess is that his counterparts at GM and Chrysler don’t so it (which is why Ford’s traction and results are better as metioned above in the BusinessWeek quote) or at most Fortune 100, 500 or 1000 corporations. 
• Not too embarassing for me at every business I have ever run.  When I first became a CEO of a small-to-medium sized company, I inherited a turnaround situation in which our most strategic customer, from which we had secured the largest contract we had ever had, was threatedning to cancel.  It was a complicated tangled mess of a situation, so it occured to me to instigate a morning meeting of all the key players in my business, every single morning, to dig ourselves out of the hole we were in, which we had done about 6 months later.  At that point, I realized that it had worked so well, with all kinds of knock-on benefits to the agility of the business, that I decided to continue reframing the morning meeting at the level of the business (not just a single project/contract/customer) and for the whole executive team.  Not a popular move, but one which paid off and the team quickly came to understand the benefits to our agility.  From that point forwards, I held morning meetings at every business i ever ran, regardless of the situation or circumstances.
• Not too embarassing for the Mayor of San Diego, California, - when we have wild-fires all over town, an emergency, multi-agency, command-and-control system kicks in, as part of the crisis management response. The public hears from the Mayor in a press conference 3 times a day, around 7am, 1pm and 10pm, without fail. Which means he has just come out of a multi-agency review meeting, 3 times a day. The public wants to hear about what’s happened (hindsight), what’s happening now (insight) and what’s going to happen next (foresight) and, as a result, lives get saved.

So again, whether you are a CEO running a business, or an executive running a department or some other part of a business, or a manager running a project or a team, what’s your excuse?  Too unpopular?  Too embarassing?  Not enough time?  Meetings are time savers (How is Your Gearbox of Meetings? ) and life savers as the wild-fire example above conveys.  With the elevated level of crisis in your business, what has happened to the level of your crisis management response? Counter-productively, as your people get busy fighting more fires, my observation is that meetings tend to get cancelled and become more ad-hoc , occurring less frequently and less effectively. Our collective hindsight, insight and foresight reduces and avoidable costs and opportunity costs increase. The Wheel$pin of execution excellence missing in action! Big mistake.

Alan Mulally understands that he needed to massively shrink his organizational OODA loop  (The Fighter Pilot’s OODA Loop:  Observe, Orient, Decide, Act), to be operating inside the OODA loop of his number one adversary right now - the economic environment and the month to month, week to week and day to day uncertainty, turbulence and volatility.  His weekly and then daily meetings of his global team are a way of doing that - massivley shrinking the organizational OODA loop to be operating on a daily and weekly cycle.  Not only that, he established a war room or situation room:

"The heart of Mulally’s data operation is located in the Taurus and Continental rooms (named after the cars).  They are beige and white spaces, about 10 foot by 20, down a flight of stairs from his 12th-floor office.  The walls are covered with color-coded tables, bar charts, and line graphs.  They represent what’s going on in every corner of Ford’s operation.  Divisions that aren’t living up to profit projections on a given week are red.  Those that are hitting their numbers are green.  Yellow means the results could go either way at the next meeting" 

Weekly business plan reviews with red, yellow, green?  Daily meetings of a global team?  What have you done to massively shrink your organizational OODA loop?  I urge you - just do it - and you too will experience the agility benefits of a morning meeting (or daily huddle at some other time of day) and a situation/war room.  The Meetings Matrix and Annual Calendar tool helps us design our operating system of meetings, to be covering the full agenda of our business with an ongoing process, cycle and discipline, including a Meeting Design Template example for a Daily Huddle/Morning Meeting.  The Traction Plan tool helps you have a red, yellow, green review of your business plan.  You too will see results which will help you cope with these uncertain, turbulent and volatile times, creating more traction than your competitors.

This is something you could formulate and announce this week, commence on Monday next week and be reaping the benefits the following week.    The kinds of benefits you will experience include:

• Having a routine daily opportunity to create and sustain a sense-of-urgency/intensity-of-effort and provide role-model leadership for the "and" of preparing for the worst and hoping (preparing) for the best.
• Batching up interactions and huddles which would be happening throughout the day into one big huddle/conversation at the start of the day, to reduce disruption (people can ask themselves - can this wait until tomorrow morning’s morning meeting?).
• Creating day-to-day continuity, transparency and synchronization, with everyone on the same page - we are never more than 24 hours out of date, leveraging the benefits/principles of Nameless, Rankless Debriefs.
• Providing a low-risk safety-net in which anyone can mention anything, to anticipate and contain unexpected events (Expecting and Managing the Unexpected), without the need to call special meetings or get special items on the agendas of other meetings.
• Many other collateral benefits, including daily connection of your team, not least in everyone knowing who’s onsite that day and having serendipitous opportunities to connect and have side convesrations as the meeting winds up and winds down.

What have you got to lose?  Not a lot, and you have a lot to gain.  Just do it!