Ensure your survival by leading an organization wide conversation that matters

Despite the widespread rhetoric about the need for organizational speed and agility, too many corporations continue their slow descent into underperformance because they are unable to confront the painful gap between their strategies and capabilities and the reality of their markets. They fail because their leaders cannot engage key people in a truthful conversation about strategic, organizational and management problems that threaten their businesses. Recently executives at Enron, Global Crossing and WorldCom were replaced because key people were unable to tell them the truth about management practices that would lead to their and their firm's destruction. These problems do not exist only in a few well-publicized corporate failures. A survey of senior executives in Harvard Business School's executive programs showed that speaking truthfully to top management about important business and organizational problems is virtually impossible in all but a few firms. A decade long action research program has identified what type of valuable information typically remains hidden from senior managers and why. It has also revealed five principles that senior teams at the corporate or business unit level can utilize to ensure that truth speaks to power about key business and organizational factors - strategy, structure, culture, human resources, management process, values and leadership - that are blocking the business from achieving strategic alignment and higher performance. When CEOs and their senior teams have shown the will and skill to apply these principles the results have been rapid and dramatic transformation of the organization and improved economic performance.