Whos in the Room?: How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them

Praise for Who′s in the Room? "Many business observers talk about executive decision making, but few take you inside the meeting rooms the way Bob Frisch does, or make you rethink what goes on there. Who′s in the Room? will cause a lot of leadership teams to set aside time to talk about how decisions are—and should be—made in their organizations. For most of those teams, that will be a unique and much–needed discussion." — Walt Macnee , vice chairman, MasterCard Worldwide "Bob Frisch′s thirty years of experience in the executive suites of the world′s largest companies have led to provocative new insights into how decisions get made at the highest levels of organizations. Whether you fully agree with his premise or not, this book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of top team effectiveness." — Warren Bennis , Distinguished Professor of Business, University of Southern California; and author, Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership " Who′s in the Room? puts forward a pragmatic, easily implemented way for companies large and small, across industries and borders, to rapidly improve the quality of their decision making and the effectiveness of their leadership teams. It highlights some basic truths about how leaders lead, how teams behave, and how organizations work, that will have you changing the way you run your company by the time you finish reading it." — Doug Stotz , executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Bank of Montreal "Rarely does a book reset the way we at look at something and truly shift our basic assumptions about routine activities. Who′s in the Room? is one of those books. It will permanently change your thinking about how organizations should be led." — Michael Treacy , coauthor, The Discipline of Market Leaders

Introduction: Who’s in the Room? 1 PART ONE: FROM PROBLEM TO PORTFOLIO 5 1 Most Companies Are Run by Teams with No Names 7 The Myth of the Top Team Illusion and Reality The Problem That Isn’t There, But Won’t Go Away 2 Team Building Won’t Solve the Problem 21 When the Shrinks Go Marching In After the Shrinks Have Gone 3 Don’t Blame the Boss 29 In Search of the Ideal Leader Inside the Box Do the ‘‘Rights’’ Thing 4 Four Fundamental Conflicts at the Heart of Senior Management Teams 41 Mission Control Versus Knights of the Round Table: Functional Specialists or Reflections of the CEO? The Team Versus the Legislature: The Representative from Finance, the Senator from Operations The House Versus the Senate: Are Some More Equal Than Others? The Majority Versus the Majority: The Impossibility of Deciding Maybe the Problem Is That There Is No Problem 5 Case Study: How One CEO Transformed His Top Team 57 The Past as Prologue Moving from a Single Top Team to Multiple Teams The Team That Sits Together Works Together Tailoring the Structure to Suit Your Needs as a Leader 6 Best Practices: Design an Organization That Delivers the Outcomes You Need 73 The Three Centers of Gravity Flexing in Five Dimensions The Portfolio and the Payoff PART TWO: THE SENIOR MANAGEMENT TEAM UNBOUND 91 7 Engage the Senior Management Team in Three Critical Conversations No Other Team Can Have 93 8 Align the Senior Management Team Around a Common View of the World 99 The Starting Point: Aligning Around Trends Clustering Trends into Drivers of Change Understanding Capabilities and Assets Walking the Boundaries of the Company: TestingWalls and Fences Defining and Selecting Opportunities 9 Prioritize and Integrate Initiatives to Hit the Strategic Bull’s–Eye 119 Asking the Nearly Impossible: Prioritizing Initiatives The Real Source of the Difficulty Changing the Conversation It’s All Relative Hitting the Bull’s–Eye: Making Initiatives Work Together 10 Move from ‘‘ Should We Do This?’’ to ‘‘ How Do We Do This?’’ 145 It All Depends: Why Initiatives Fail Putting on the Brakes: The Value of Parochialism The American Red Cross: Managing Dependencies at the Speed of Disaster Going from ‘‘Should’’ to ‘‘How’’ Fixing What’s Actually Broken 11 Tailor Your Portfolio of Teams for Top Performance Now 167 Thinking It Through Putting the New Approach into Motion Repurposing the SMT Who’s in the Room? Acknowledgments 179 The Author 183 Index 185

Bob Frisch , managing partner of The Strategic Offsites Group, has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to German mittelstand family businesses to the U.S. Department of State. Bob′s work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal , Bloomberg Businessweek , and Fortune .

“Great guide for any leader to use in mapping out his or her advisory teams” —800 CEO Read “Authoritative and pragmatic look at how to make the right calls” —Julian Birkinshaw, Management Today “Offers real–world strategies for making the best of how organizations seem to work” —The Leader Lab “How to structure organizational teams in a way that is both more realistic and more productive is at the heart of Frisch’s book” —CIO Magazine “What you really want from a book on organizational decision making and leadership” —New York Journal of Books “You’ll know his advice is working when you see a dramatic drop–off in people coming into your office and asking, "Why wasn’t I in the room?" —Matthew May, Amex OPEN Forum “ Who’s in the Room? f alls in the great category…due to the book′s ability to jar your perspective of how teams do and should operate.” —Michael Wade, Execupundit