(I write of Haiti and U.S. politics together only to illustrate a point, and not to imply any comparison between these events. I hope that you will join me and millions of others who have already contributed to one of the many organizations leading Haiti’s earthquake relief efforts.)

In my experience, organizational preparedness for major, unexpected changes varies widely. Most organizations pay lip service, with little more than rueful acknowledgement of the possibility of disruption. Some develop ‘business continuity’ plans, which are targeted at sustaining key assets and processes, like computer systems and networks, in the event of catastrophe. Far fewer have a comprehensive, robust capability to weather the literal and figurative storms of unknown and unexpected events. The most effective organizations prepare not for specific disasters, but with a well-tested process for making effective strategic and tactical decisions in the face of sudden, significant, unexpected change.

Every organization’s strategy is the result of its mission, its internal capabilities, and its external environment. Over time, mission and capability are likely to evolve to reflect the changing realities of the external environment. The normal strategic planning process, when properly executed, entails continuous monitoring of environment and management of capability and strategy itself. Sudden change in the external environment requires rapid and confident recalibration of the strategy. The decision making process is the same, only the time scale is different.

The difficulty with which most organizations mange and execute strategy means that they are ill-equipped to handle the inevitable lurches. Fingers are pointed, emotions flare, poor decisions are made, and must be made again, efforts are wasted, and chaos reigns. By contrast, healthy organizations quickly pick themselves up, look around to understand the new realities, quickly make well-informed decisions, and get on with the urgent tasks at hand.

How will your organization handle the next lurch?

I recently came across an article about earthquake aftershocks:  Earthquakes Actually 19th Century Aftershocks.  I’m fascinated by all things earth science and started to read.

“Aftershocks happen after a big earthquake because the movement on the fault changed the forces in the earth that act on the fault itself and nearby. Aftershocks go on until the fault recovers.”

In other words, after a large shift, aftershocks are felt as everything around it rearranges itself to accommodate the new state.

What a great analogy for change in organizations!

Here’s one image that comes up:  after making the push for a large change, you have to wait and see what else is disrupted as the organization and the people in it try to rearrange to accommodate the switch.  In that case the aftershocks are the fixes we come up with the handle the unexpected impact of the change.

It turns out that the slower an earthquake fault moves, the longer it takes to dampen the effects of a large earthquake.  While aftershocks on the San Andreas subside after 10 years, aftershocks along the New Madrid fault are still occurring 200 years after its last big quake.

It seems to me that a fast-moving fault like the San Andreas is basically leaving aftershocks behind.  The aftershocks don’t happen later because the fault has already moved again.  It doesn’t have to accommodate to the old-new state because there is a new-new state.  It would be like upgrading to a new IT system before everyone was trained on the old one.  You wouldn’t keep training people on the old system just because you hadn’t trained everyone yet.

It’s not that fast-moving fault lines are particularly resilient and bouncing back to normal quickly; instead their rate of change is just too fast to keep up with.

An interesting phenomenon, one you’d want to avoid with organization change.

How is this playing out in your organization?

(Editor’s note: This post first appeared in the Change Starts Here blog at Enclaria.com)

I am a big fan of public radio

This week, Mike Miner wrote about WBEZ and the new “Chicago Public Media” strategic plan. It’s a plan that charts our direction for the next few years. Torey, staff and the board have been working on the plan since March 2008. It got leaked to the Chicago Reader and subsequently picked apart. So I thought I would ask Daniel Ash, our VP of Strategic Communications, to set the record straight.

Our strategic plan is a work in progress. Most staff and board members have participated in at least one meeting since March 2008. I’m one of the lucky ones, having participated in at least five discussions. In each meeting the discussion was wrapped around this question: How do we continue to accomplish our public service mission? The good news is that lunch was usually provided.

I did not plan to release this plan this way, but since it’s been posted without permission on another site I figure why not ask you directly what you think. Warning: when you put creative people in a room and ask them to imagine the future, you get BIG—sometimes wild—ideas. Hint: we’re still working on the practical translation of what we’re actually going to do over the next three years.

Here’s the deal: if Chicago Public Radio is not relevant to our audience—our community—we’re not doing the right thing. This document provides a broad framework for us to ask even more questions about what we’ll do and how we’ll do it. If you’ve got a moment, please read it and tell us what you think. This is just the beginning.

And without any more stalling, here’s the Strategic Plan 2010-2013.

If you choose not to read the horror story that is their plan document, I’ll give you my quick take: if the consulting firm that produced it could be held liable for professional malpractice, the plan document and the process that created it would be strong evidence in support of a claim. If nothing else, you should look to this example as a reminder of what not to do in your organization’s strategic planning process.

The most obvious problem with the plan is its authorship. Despite the fact that it carries the logo of a legitimate consulting firm, the plan’s content is seen as coming only from the WBEZ’s president. According to Miner’s research (emphasis added):

The new plan claims that this mission was arrived at by “strategic consensus.” But my soundings of people within or close to the organization suggest that the plan is generally regarded as an expression of the will, vision, and rhetorical flourishes of its president, Torey Malatia. Though the plan is written in the third-person plural, there are occasional lapses into ‘I’ and ‘my.’

The role of a strategic planning consultant is to expertly guide the process, and protect the interests of the organization, not to simply echo the will of its leader. What value did the consulting firm add to this process?

There is strong evidence that the process that WBEZ used to get to this point is flawed. As noted in the blog post, WBEZ has been working for over 18 months on the plan so far, and participation in the process by even the director of strategic communication has been spotty: “Most staff and board members have participated in at least one meeting since March 2008. I’m one of the lucky ones, having participated in at least five discussions.” So exactly who has been part of the process?

With most staff and board members having participated in ‘at least’ one meeting, is there any continuity, or executive commitment to the process? Even the most challenged organization I’ve worked with is able to agree to an enterprise wide strategy map within the first two months of focused effort. The fifteen page document, produced at an average rate of less than one page per month, fails to identify and clarify the strategy in actionable terms. As stated in the blog post: “Hint: we’re still working on the practical translation of what we’re actually going to do over the next three years.”This is a candid admission of the failure of WBEZ’s planning process.

Leaking the self-described “work in progress” to the public was no less than an act of organizational insurrection. The innocent sounding invitation to “tell us what you think” is an open invitation to discredit both the content and the process that has been used. There is little evidence of an understanding of how stakeholders value WBEZ, and their judgement of this weak, amateurish effort will be swift and sure.

read this book

Most popular ideas in the domain of organizational management have a limited shelf-life. Those that gain widespread attention usually do so on the strength of a published work. My bookshelves are filled with titles that in their time, were purported to be the next ‘big idea’ in management, but have since faded into relative obscurity. This pattern is as much a function of the audience for the ideas as the ideas themselves; executives and managers crave the easy answers and magical insights that are promised by these works. So when an idea remains relevant and applicable for more than a few years, it stands out. 

Of course, balanced scorecard has been an exceptionally durable concept. The idea of a scorecard (a collection of measures) as a tool for management has been around for decades, and is thought to have originated at General Electric during the 1950s. Kaplan and Norton elaborated the idea of a scorecard as a tool for strategic management beginning with their first Harvard Business Review articles on the topic in 1992 and 1993, and their book The Balanced Scorecard in 1996. The BSC articles and original book were extremely popular, and remain so today.But I never recommend Kaplan and Norton’s first BSC book to anyone embarking on a journey of strategic management.

skip this book

As elegant and appealing as the BSC idea was, the early literature focused far more on what the BSC is than how organizations should actually use it. Combined with the initial popularity of the BSC, this gap in the literature led to many failed BSC implementations among early adopters in the late 1990s. There simply wasn’t enough documented experience to understand how to successfully implement the BSC, and trial and error is an especially inefficient way to learn.

Reports of widespread failure of BSC implementations led Kaplan and Norton to write their second book on BSC in 2000, The Strategy-Focused Organization. This is a far better place to start than the first book.

The SFO concept (as it came to be known in the BSC practitioner community) was based on observations of the many organizations failing with the BSC implementations, and the far smaller number that were successful. It identifies five key behaviors in those organizations that were successful. Failing to model any of these is a powerful predictor of failure; adopting all five improves the likelihood but does not guarantee success. The SFO behaviors have influenced the work of every serious BSC practitioner I’ve ever met.

1. Mobilize and engage executive leaders with the necessity for organizational change and the strategic management process. It is not sufficient to get the senior executive to agree to implement BSC. He or she, along with all members of the organization’s leadership team must commit to no less than changing the way they manage the organization, and must understand that the implementation process happens of the course of years, not weeks or months. A senior executive looking to BSC as a quick fix is a certain predictor of a failed effort.
2. Translate the strategy into language that everyone can understand, a strategy map. Remarkably, many organizations implement their BSCs without developing a strategy map; this outcome is the result of a lack of centrality of the strategy map in Kaplan and Norton’s early writing. Bluntly, if you don’t have a strategy map as the basis for your measures, you don’t have a balanced scorecard.
3. Align the parts of the organization with the overall strategy. Except in the very smallest of organizations, it is necessary to interpret the enterprise strategy for each part of the organization; business units and support organizations, such as information technology and human capital. This usually means subordinate strategy maps and BSCs that are cascaded from the overall strategy map.
4. Ensure that each member of the organization understands his or her role in executing strategy. The natural inclination for executives to play their strategy close to the vest inhibits this vital behavior. Broadly communicating the content of the strategy and an unvarnished accounting of the organization’s actual performance are table stakes; embedding the language of the strategy in each employee’s performance management process is the first realization of this behavior.
5. Embed the process of strategic management in business processes. Because BSC-enabled strategic management is unfamiliar and can make leaders a bit uncomfortable, the reflexive tendency is to quarantine the BSC from everyday management process. Successful organizations recognize that strategic management is an ongoing process, not simply a once-a-year event.

Needless to say, there is much more to say on the five SFO behaviors. Remember that skipping any of these will almost certainly mean your change program will fail.

How is your organization doing at each of these?

The New Yorker piece begins with a recollection of the news item from a few weeks ago, in which two Northwest Airlines pilots overshot their destination (Minneapolis) by over a hundred miles (the pilots claim they were engrossed in a complex work scheduling program on their laptop computers), then goes on to comment on the effect of multi-tasking on our performance. According to Paumgarten:

Studies have shown that multitasking, even of the law-abiding kind, doesn’t work. You just perform each task less efficiently. Marshall McLuhan predicted that technology would sharpen our senses, but, instead, as the writer Michael Bugeja said last week, it seems to split them. (A few years ago, Bugeja, with a colleague, started writing an article called “Media Saturation Kills,” but he got distracted by another deadline and never finished it.)

I first became familiar with the concept of multitasking many years ago when I started working with mainframe computers. Learning about the operating system, I came to understand that while it appeared that these giant computers were working on many things at once, in reality they could only work on one thing at a time. Much of the inner workings of the hardware and operating system was devoted to handling interruptions; quickly saving the status of the interrupted task so that work could shift to the next task in line. When there were too many tasks, the computer would spend more of its time switching between tasks than actually doing useful work, and progress would grind to a halt. Computer architecture has evolved, and some computers can actually do more than one thing in any given instant, but there is still a lot of suspending and switching going on. But enough about computers.

Human organizations, by their very nature, work on more than one thing at a time. Creating value is complicated business, and each individual’s contribution to value creation must somehow be coordinated by the organization itself. But like the pilot with his laptop, or the distracted driver texting on a smartphone, there are dangerous adverse consequences to trying to do too much. There seems to be a natural tendency for organizations to take on a larger change agenda than their capacity to accomplish them; and only deliberate intervention can reduce the agenda to manageable size.

Most of my clients easily admit to having too much going on at once, and no good way to prioritize what must be done. The sign of a healthy strategic management process is an understanding of the organization’s capacity for change, and careful management of the agenda within that constraint.

How many things are you working on right now? How many things is your organization trying to accomplish?

Having pre-meetings is far different from having post-meetings. Post-meetings happen because not everything that needed to be said came out during the actual meeting, due to fear, mainly. Pre-meetings are held to make sure that what needs to happen in the actual meeting actually happens.

What do I mean by the actual meeting (herein referred to as the Meeting)?  The Meeting is where people with crazy schedules (usually in leadership positions) somehow find a way to meet all at the same time. The topic for the Meeting, in whole or in part, is your change initiative.

To make the best use of the team’s time during the Meeting, only do the things in the Meeting that need to be done together as a team.Focus the team on the task at hand, whether it is a discussion about solutions or whether a decision must be made. Everything else should be done beforehand in pre-meetings with individuals or small groups.

Some of the things you can take care of in pre-meetings are:

• Training
• Seeking opinions, to see how each person is leaning
• Answering questions, since some will not ask in front of the rest of the team
• Target key people to speak up during the meeting
• Persuade people who need persuading

Notice that I’m not talking about a pre-meeting e-mail. This is a real sit-down (or phone call if necessary) meeting where you are preparing individuals for the Meeting (and also helping you prepare for the Meeting). If the Meeting and its desired outcome are really important to the success of your change initiative, an e-mail is not going to cut it.

Having pre-meetings may seem like overkill, or even like playing politics. But, if you’ve ever been in a leadership team meeting that has careened out of control or that has become stuck on an irrelevant or minute point, most likely there was not enough preparation of the attendees beforehand.

Take the time to have pre-Meeting meetings so you can focus the Meeting on achieving the desired outcome for your initiative.

(Editor’s note: This post first appeared in the Change Starts Here blog at Enclaria.com)

Outcomes at PrimeCorp

As a result of the risk-adjusted forecasts, both the baseline and with leadership expectation of the impact of the proposed strategic management system, PrimeCorp had satisfactorily completed its cost-benefit analysis and projected payback. Curtis (PrimeCorp’s CEO) soon thereafter approved the project as proposed, and our work was underway. Working closely with Jim (PrimeCorp’s head of strategic planning), we undertook to transform the way in which PrimeCorp managed its strategy. The transformation took about two years.

During the first year, we used the discipline of balanced scorecard strategy maps and measuresto capture and refine a vision of strategy for the PrimeCorp enterprise, as well as its several divisions. The process revealed cultural tensions; resistance to change (even though no one on the management team really liked the existing strategic management process), and tension between corporate-level governance and a tradition of division-level autonomy. Both in one-on-one discussions and leadership meetings, the appropriate role of the corporation was portrayed variously as simply that of a holding company and a bank providing capital, to a necessary facilitator of innovation, synergy, and simple scale economies between division accustomed to operating with limited oversight. While neither extreme was realized, there was a perceptible shift towards more robust corporate governance, with integrated strategic planning and financial forecasting at its core.

Our comprehensive program of strategy communication brought the message of strategy and personal participation in execution to hundreds of middle-level managers across the organization; a population to whom the content of corporate and divisional strategy had previously been opaque.

While our effort to justify the initial investment introduced the dimension of risk into financial forecasting, the idea of risk did not become part of the everyday vocabulary of forecasting. Our mandate was to transform strategic planning; budgeting and forecasting was outside of our scope. Exposure to the idea of risk management was simply not enough motivation to re-design PrimeCorp’s tradition financial forecasting.

Over the following years, the improvement in PrimeCorp’s financial performance well exceeded even the most liberal of the scenarios used to justify the effort in the first place.It wasn’t our work that created the improvement; it was the tenacious effort of hundreds of executives, senior and middle managers, front-line supervisors and employees; armed with a clear vision of PrimeCorp’s strategy that made it happen.

The Offer to You

I have developed a spreadsheet-based model of the risk-adjusted forecast approach to share with you, in the hope that you too will make a better business case for enhanced strategic management. As promised in the first post, the first five people to send a note to me describing your situation at info@tenacioustortoise.com will receive a copy of the tool, and an hour of guidance in its use by telephone at no charge. I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Needless to say, this series of posts has been much lengthier and detailed than most posts here. Was this useful? Too much? I need your feedback. Please offer your questions and comments below.

Putting the Model to Work

The first revelation of PrimeCorp’s risk-adjusted forecast was that it was lower than the original forecast.

To illustrate how this happened, imagine forecasting your personal income for next year. Let’s say that your salary is X dollars per year, so that is your original forecast. But with a risk-adjusted view of your future earnings, you might also acknowledge a 15% chance of getting a bonus equal to 10% of your salary, and you might also acknowledge a 20% chance of losing your job and not finding another one for the rest of the year. So 15% of the time your expected income would be X / 2 (this reflects an assumption that you have an equal chance of losing your job on any day of the year, in which case your expected income would be the same as losing your job halfway through the year). 60% of the time your income would simply be X, and 25% of the time your income would be 1.1 * X.

By combining these possible outcomes with their odds of taking place, we get:

( .15 * 1.1 * X) + ( .65 * X) + (.20 * .5 * X) = .915 * X

In other words, the risk-adjusted forecast for your income is 91.5% of your salary.  

In capturing the characteristics of ‘below plan’ and above plan years at PrimeCorp, we learned that given an equal chance of each, there was more downside potential in the ‘below plan’ years than upside potential in the ‘above plan’ years. As a result, their risk-adjusted forecast was below the original forecast. This was a bit of a revelation to PrimeCorp’s leadership team.   

Changing the Odds

To then forecast the prospective impact of a strategy management program, we asked PrimeCorp’s leaders to adjust the odds of having a ‘below’ ‘above’, and ‘as planned’ year given successful execution of their strategy. The responses ranged from no or very modest impact from the skeptics, to a cautiously larger impact from those who supported the idea of implementing our proposed strategic management process.

After some discussion, their sense of the impact was consolidated into three scenarios:

• ‘Low’ impact, with a small avoidance of the ‘below plan’ outcome, the same odds of an ‘as planned’ outcome, and no improvement in the likelihood of the ‘above plan’ outcome, with respective odds of 20%, 55% and 25%;
• ‘Moderate’ impact, shifting the curve, with respective odds of 20%, 49%, and 31%;
• ‘Improved’ impact, with respective odds of 15%, 55%, and 30%.

Running the model with PrimeCorp’s own expectations yielded definitive results. Even under the most conservative scenario, the investment in the strategic management system would be paid back in under three years. And the forecast was based entirely on inputs from PrimeCorp.

Next: Outcomes at PrimeCorp, and the case summary.

The Different Approach

We already knew that a key element of PrimeCorp’s existing strategic planning process was its financial forecasts. The annual planning book (hundreds of pages, highly confidential, and not shared beyond the executive team), contained page after page of spreadsheets describing past and expected future performance of each of PrimeCorp’s several divisions, as well as an enterprise-wide roll-up of the numbers. The executive team, which consisted of the heads of each division (as well as such corporate functions as HR Finance, and IT) annually created their individual division forecasts as a function of past performance, and their own expectations of the next five years of future results. This process was time-consuming and filled with understandable tension – between division leaders’ desire to soft-peddle the numbers, and CEO and board pressure to raise revenue and manage costs to achieve year-over-year improvement in profitability.

What was evident in the forecast numbers was their inability to capture the uncertainty in establishing them. This was our opening to capture the value of our improving PrimeCorp’s strategic planning process. From Part I, you’ll recall that I challenged Curtis and Jim to pay us $25,000 for a couple of weeks of effort to make the case for our proposal. I said, “Instead of just looking at your forecasts as a set of fixed numbers, we’ll consider the likelihood of the forecasts playing out. Our firm won’t introduce any numbers into the calculation – we’ll just use your and your team’s own expectations.” Curtis accepted the approach, and on a handshake, we got started that day.

Choosing the Levers

Like any business, PrimeCorp’s profitability is the result of inputs. Looking at the forecasts, it became clear that for each division, profit was the result of revenue, cost of goods sold, operating expense, and the cost of invested capital. To improve profit, a division had to accomplish some combination of increasing revenue, managing the cost of inputs and transforming them to outputs (the cost of goods sold, or COGS), manage its overhead costs (such as corporate overhead and IT), or reduce the cost of invested capital (primarily in each division’s necessary and sizable inventory). Of course, each of these four inputs were themselves the result of a multitude of contributing factors. But to manage complexity, we chose only these four inputs for each division as the appropriate level of detail for the exercise.

Capturing Uncertainty

Having both forecast and actual results for each division in several prior years, it was easy to judge the quality of PrimeCorp’s forecasting process. Revenue and capital cost were easier to forecast than COGS and operating expense, and variation in all resulted in years with significant over- and under-performance to the forecast, as well as years near forecast. There was no apparent bias in the forecasts; performance had been significantly above or below plan about the same number of times over the past ten years.

To quantify the uncertainty in the forecast for the next fiscal year, we imagined repeatedly ‘rolling the dice’ on the outcomes of the upcoming year. Sometimes the outcomes would be below the forecast, sometimes above. Ranking all of these hypothetical outcomes from poorest to best, we could then put these outcomes in three buckets; the bucket for the poorest 25% of them would be called ‘below plan,’ the middle 50% of them would be in a bucket called ‘as planned,’ and bucket for the best 25% would be called ‘above plan.’ Note that this was not an exercise in predicting the likelihood of any of these outcomes – by fixing the probabilities for each bucket, we could then ask a different pair of questions, “how bad would a ‘below plan’ year look, and how good would an ‘above plan’ year look? We assigned the original forecast values of revenue, COGS, operating and capital costs to the ‘as planned’ scenario. The first key input to the model were answers to the question, “what would the four inputs look like in the ‘below’ and ‘above’ plan year scenarios?”

To capture these inputs, my hope was to interview each division head and capture their own expectations for next year. But Curtis was less comfortable with the subjectivity of that approach, and instead we turned to past history. By comparing the forecast vs. actual outcomes for the four inputs in each of the last ten years of history, we could come up with reasonable estimates of the inputs parameters for the ‘above’ and ‘below’ scenarios (for those with statistics backgrounds: we actually determined the standard deviation for each of the four inputs, and used the forecast plus or minus one standard deviation for the parameters). Historically, above plan years happened when revenue increased and costs, especially operating costs, were held in check. Below plan years were more likely to be the result of higher COGS, not significantly reduced revenue. Although the likelihood of a below and above plan year were equal in the model, we learned that above plan years were only modestly above plan, while below plan years could be significantly below plan.

Rolling Up to a Revelation

Pulling all the input parameters together made it possible to create a risk-adjusted forecast for the upcoming year (and years beyond). The first revelation was that the risk-adjusted forecast was lower than the original forecast.

Next: Putting the Model to Work

A few years ago, I was faced with a unprecedented challenge by a client, to attach a dollar value to the benefit of a proposed consulting engagement. The details of the organization are not important to the concepts in the case, but suffice to say I was hungry for the opportunity to consult to this large organization.

A Bit More Background

The organization in question was (and still is) a large, for-profit business with a national presence across the U.S. (let’s call it PrimeCorp), and a decades-long track record as either the largest or second largest player among the few occupying a unique industry niche. Two of my colleagues had been engaged in attempting to sell PrimeCorp on the idea of revising and enhancing its strategic planning process, a process that would take at least two years of design, facilitation, and coaching on our part. Our firm was up to the task we were proposing, but my two colleagues hadn’t yet made the case.

Competing with a few other consulting firms, we had successfully qualified ourselves as PrimeCorp’s preferred consultant. Jim, PrimeCorp’s head of strategic planning, was familiar with our firm and our approach, and had invested much of his energy in paving the way for us. But Jim couldn’t award us the work – the decision lay exclusively with Curtis, the firm’s forceful and charismatic CEO. And he wasn’t buying, yet. The question wasn’t whether we would do the work – it was whether PrimeCorp would make the investment at all.

The Fly in the Ointment

Curtis was secure in his position as CEO, having occupied the job for many years prior to our arrival. He had close ties to members of PrimeCorp’s board, and the loyal support of his executive team. But his firm was suffering from declining profitability, relatively flat sales, and an emerging threat of technology-based competition from outside the industry. Curtis was frustrated with PrimeCorp’s lack of strategic clarity, and poor track record of executing on past strategic intent. With margins becoming thinner, PrimeCorp’s overall management style was a continuation of its long history of risk-aversion.

Determined to better manage rising costs, Curtis had recently imposed a rigorous capital planning discipline on his executive team. All requested capital investments over a low threshold would require sponsors to submit a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis, including projected payback periods. The CBAs would go to PrimeCorp’s board of directors for approval. No CBA, no investment. Since Curtis himself would by necessity be the sponsor of the proposed revamp of strategic planning, he wasn’t about to make an exception for himself from his own policy. So  Jim’s challenge to us was to help him and Curtis make the case for the investment. My colleagues tried to present anecdotal evidence of the benefits of improved strategic planning in other organizations, but Curtis and Jim weren’t convinced. To them, our anecdotes were just marketing hype.

A Different Approach

I had joined the PrimeCorp team quite late in the process, when it appeared that we wouldn’t be winning the business. My task was to scour our firm’s scant data on past client performance, and develop a more compelling set of data describing the benefits they had received. But there simply wasn’t enough data, and what little there was couldn’t be assembled into anything convincing. After some head-scratching, I came up with a different approach. But I needed to pitch it directly to Jim and Curtis. With little to lose, we scheduled the meeting.

Our Challenge to PrimeCorp

Jim and Curtis really wanted to do the work, but needed proof. In what could have been our final presentation at PrimeCorp, I apologized to Curtis for our failure to make the case. “Let’s approach this differently. Instead of using other companies’ data, we’ll only use PrimeCorp’s. Give us two weeks, complete access to both your existing strategic planning documents and your executive team, and $25,000 (for our time), and we’ll make the case.If we’re successful, we’ll credit you the $25k against our overall proposal. If we’re not, we’ll part company.” So PrimeCorp’s downside risk was only $25,000. Curtis was intrigued. “Tell me more,” he said.

Next: The Different Approach