Must-Win Battles
Creating the Focus You Need to
Achieve Your Key Business Goals
By Peter Killing, et al.
Financial Times / Prentice Hall
December 2005
ISBN: 0273704575
234 Pages, Illustrated, 6 ½” x 9 ½”
$62.50 Hardcover
Another month, another initiative? Sometimes it can seem that way to busy managers. Each initiative, taken alone, may make sense, but most organizations have too many priorities. Everything is important. The end result, of course, is that nothing is really important, and the organization lacks focus. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can break the stalemate by focusing your organization's resources and energy on the three to five key battles that you must win in order to achieve your most important goals.
Once established, these must-win battles become the focal point of decisions and action plans, and command the resources and commitment they deserve. Must-Win Battles will show you how to identify and agree on the critical challenges that will make or break your business, and help you to mobilize people and resources to achieve those goals by combining strategic focus with emotional commitment. Must-win battles are about making strategy and building the team.
At the heart of Must-Win Battles is a process for learning to do fewer things, and doing them better. While you focus on your “Must-Wins”, you will free-up resources by shutting down your “Must-Stops”. At the same time, the management team will develop a common view of what success in each battle looks like and will commit to the individual and group behavior needed to keep driving progress over the weeks and months that it will take to achieve success. Over time, individual battles will be won or lost: the enduring victory that drives further success is in the new ways of working together that emerge from the must-win battle process. You start by winning battles; you end by transforming your organization.
Reviews
"Enlightening and thought provoking in an era of cluttered agendas. Must
Win Battles sets a clear path for leaders to focus their team's head, heart,
and hands."
Michael D. White, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, PepsiCo International,
New York
“Moving a company to the next level requires confronting the right challenges,
and Peter Killing, Thomas Malnight, and Tracey Keys show how to pick your
battles and then how to win them. Their Must-Win Battles provides a practical
playbook for unleashing and aligning the intellectual and emotional energies
essential for any business triumph.”
Michael Useem, Director-Center for Leadership and Change Management, The
Wharton School and author of The Leadership Moment
"In "Must Win Battles" Peter Killing and Thomas Malnight have
distilled their richly varied experiences drawn from many organizations over
many years. Together they have created a practical handbook for all managers
who are interested in re-energizing and improving their business performance.
Must Win Battles is easy to read and brimful with practical advise; well worth
a few hours of your time".
Iain Ferguson CBE , Chief Executive , Tate & Lyle PLC. Named European
Businessman of the Year by Forbes Magazine, 2005
“Working with must-win battles has fundamentally changed our approach
to where we seek growth in the market and the way we engage our people in
realizing these goals. Must-win battles are the glue that ties the business
together globally, that everyone understands and can contribute to. The process
clarifies for everyone the long-term vision and business direction, where
to allocate resources and why it is important to get aligned.”
Diego Bevilacqua, President, Global Business: Foodsolutions, Unilever
“Every executive knows that there are certain battles that must be won
for the business tobe successful. This great new book provides a real-world,
step-by-step approach to choosing the right battles in a way that helps unleash
the organizational will to achieve them. Must Win Battles is a wonderful contribution
to the art and science of management! So much so that it’s inspired
me to launch my own MWB journey.”
Bob Rieder, President & CEO Cardiome Pharma Corp.
Contents
Chapter 1 The Must-Win Battle Journey
This chapter provides a roadmap for the book, introducing and defining must-win
battles (MWBs) and what the journey to achieving them involves.
Section I Preparing the Journey
Chapter 2 Understanding Your Starting Conditions
Every business embarks on their MWB journey from a different place. These
unique starting conditions will impact the choice of MWBs, the urgency surrounding
their execution and the relative emphasis on the emotional versus the intellectual
elements of the journey. This chapter highlights the four critical starting
conditions that need to be understood, provides tools to think about each,
and translates them into implications for the MWB process.
Chapter 3 Leadership: Preparing for the Challenge
Even if the business conditions point towards a MWB journey, there is one
more critical question for the leader before she or he commits to the process:
am I capable of leading it? Leading a MWB journey is a big challenge, requiring
skills and capabilities of a leader that go well beyond managing “business
as usual”. Preparing for the journey explores the “leadership
imperatives” or challenges inherent in the MWB process. It offers tools
to assess the leader’s readiness to lead the journey, which can entail
high personal risk and need to change…as well as approaches to manage
these risks and demands. Because once it starts there really is no opportunity
to turn back.
Section II Engaging the Top Team
Chapter 4 Opening Windows: Sharing Perspectives and Realities
Opening windows activities and exercises start the group moving forward on
both the emotional and intellectual dimensions in parallel. The aims are to
build a shared understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the
business, while at the same time, surfacing the team’s personal feelings
about how the top team works together. Detailed outlines of exercises together
with real-world examples illustrate how the transparency of the discussions
begins sharing and aligning the team’s perspectives and starting new
ways of working together.
Chapter 5 Defining the Battles: Colliding to Decide
As the team moves into the iterative process that is defining must-win battles,
things are starting to get real. There will be winners and losers as the long
list of potential initiatives gets robustly challenged to reach the shortlist
of 3 to 5 battles that will receive the lion’s share of management attention
and resources in the coming months and years. The shared understandings and
openness built by in the previous stage are the critical background for ensuring
productive dialogue at this stage. The characteristics of well-chosen MWBs
are outlined, along with exercises and real-world examples to illustrate how
this process works in practice.
Chapter 6 Breaking the Silos: Committing to One Agenda
Even the best-chosen list of MWBs runs the risk of failure if the team is
not committed to implementing it back at the office. The final part of the
kick-off process is about making this critical emotional commitment to a collective
agenda – moving away from silo-based, individualistic thinking. Again
through exercises and examples, the chapter addresses the tough questions
of how the team will work together in future to ensure battles are won, and
how each individual within the team will contribute – or, in some cases,
choose not to participate. It also sets the stage for taking the MWB agenda
back to the office – to engage the broader organization.
Section III Making It Happen: Engaging the Organization
Chapter 7 Making It Happen: Engaging the Organization
The top team is not going to get far trying to win the MWBs alone –
they need to quickly embed the agenda in the broader organization, aligning
activities and getting momentum going if they are to win in their marketplace.
But this is easier said than done – and will require energy, tenacity
and courage from the organization’s leaders: mobilizing resources and
actions against the battles and motivating people to deliver. Using a series
of examples and tools, the chapter discusses the key stages of this process,
and the major challenges that need to be overcome including dealing with the
“organizational swamp” of daily activities, maintaining energy
levels across the company and refocusing battles which are off track.
Chapter 8 From Tent to Tent: The Unilever Ice-Cream Journey
Kees van der Graaf (President, Europe of Unilever) provides a candid perspective
on how the MWB journey unfolds in practice. The chapter tells the story of
the first two years of the Unilever Ice-Cream division’s journey, its
ups and downs, achievements and lessons learned, both for the leader and the
organization.
Chapter 9 Where Do You Go From Here?
A final round-up highlights, briefly, the core principles that you can apply
to your critical business challenges, whether or not you choose to embark
on a MWB journey.
Features
• The book is structured like the executive program at IMD upon which
it is based, and is full of the real voices of participants who have made
the MWB "journey".
• Reveals a tested framework for deciding what is "must-win,"
as opposed to merely urgent or everyday.
• Shows how to focus people, resources and time on the most decisive
activities and challenges.
• Unique, unlike other books, Must-Win Battles bridges the gap between
strategy development and implementation by tackling the intellectual and emotional
challenges simultaneously.
Author
Peter Killing and Tom Malnight are Professors of Strategy at IMD. The ideas
in this book come directly from their extensive work with management teams
across many countries, and in both large and small organizations, who are
creating winning strategies using the must-win battle concepts. From these
experiences it is abundantly clear that the "intellectual" approach
to strategy is not enough. What Peter, Tom and the managers highlighted in
this book believe is that "strategic priorities with heart" will
win the day.
At IMD Peter runs company-specific programs for companies such as Nestlé,
BMW, PepsiCo International, Scottish & Newcastle, Tetra Laval and Tate
& Lyle. Tom’s experience includes work with companies including
Unilever, A.P. Moller - Maersk Group, Masterfoods, Firmenich, Carlsberg and
Adecco. He also directs IMD's Booster program, an intensive program focusing
on accelerating project and team development, while Peter runs the Breakthrough
Program for Senior Executives and Mastering New Challenges, a program for
managers about to take on new responsibilities.
Both Tom and Peter have written widely on the topics of strategy, change and
leadership, in publications ranging from the Harvard Business Review to the
Academyof Management Journal. Peter is a co-author of a strategy text, Strategic
Analysis and Action, which is currently in its sixth edition.
Tom has a DBA from the Harvard Business School and was on the faculty of The
Wharton School for seven years before joining IMD. Before his doctorate, he
spent ten years with Mitsubishi International Corporation, including two years
in Japan. Peter holds a PhD from the Ivey Business School in Canada, where
he taught for twenty years and was Associate Dean of Executive Education at
the time he came to IMD.
Tracey Keys has twenty years of experience as a consultant and manager, focused
on complex strategy and organizational issues. She has worked with companies
in the media, consumer goods, finance and new media sectors across Europe,
the US and Africa. Previously, Tracey has held senior roles at the BBC, where
she was Head of Corporate Planning, Booz ½Allen ½Hamilton, and
Deloitte & Touche/ Braxton Associates. She has also been an active advisor
to start-ups, several of which have been launched successfully in the technology,
publishing, wine and consulting fields. Tracey is a Fulbright Scholar and
holds an MBA from The Wharton School where she was distinguished as a Palmer
Scholar.