The Bottleneck at the Top of the Bottle - Often the Ceo, Very Often a Revered Top Manager

It is interesting that any strategy execution or a transformation process encounters its most severe hurdle at the very top. As Gary Hamel said in HBR

" Where are you likely to find people with the least diversity of experience, the largest investment in the past, and the greatest reverence for industry dogma?

At the top!"

Right from Thomas Watson of IBM who proclaimed in 1943 that there is a world market for five computers to Bill Gates who commented that 640 Kbyte should be enough memory for everyone in 1981, we have encountered fiercest stumbling blocks to effective transformation at the top.

And strategy has very little chance to get executed, if the top management refuses to champion or sponsor the cause. Consider a case of a large scale real estate development for an Indian energy major, where the top boss commented that the architectural design is bold & perhaps will not be easily acceptable to Indian consumers. Subsequent focus groups revealed that the consumers loved the design & craved for a world class luxury development in their backyards.

However the senior managers (executing the project), kept emphasizing that the development plan needs to be altered without giving any logical reasons , just so that they remain on the right side of the top boss. They refuted all consumer data & research and relied only on the focus group of one- the top boss. As for the development expertise of the top boss, well he may have built a bungalow or two for himself.

The first step in transformation therefore is to generate buy-in from the top boss & hiss senior managers. Without convincing them of the efficacy of strategy and enlisting them as champions, any transformation does not have an iota of chance to succeed.

Any transformation programme or strategy workshop thus has to spend considerable time to seek inputs & encourage involvement from the top management. The top management should own up the strategy and become reasonably passionate about driving the change. They need to be given specific roles to steer the programme to its logical conclusion.

The world is changing very fast. Change is an imperative, not a 'good to have'. The top guy has to recognize that. He need to own the need the change, the necessity to run to stay at the same place. Organizations need to change the rules, before their competitor does it. As Anita Roddick of the highly innovative Body Shop, said, "I watch where the cosmetics industry is going and then walk in the opposite direction."