Productive Coach Writing Partner

In the 1990s the CEO of AlliedSignal, Larry Bossidy, famously integrated a focus on execution into his company’s culture. He insisted on rigorously questioning and rethinking the various hows of executing on strategy: “How can we get it done?” “How will we synchronize our actions?” “How will we measure progress?” and so on. Such questions can help you identify key metrics and milestones—along with possible bottlenecks—to align your people and projects and keep your plans on track. They will expose risks, including strains on the organization’s capacity.

The top team at Lego neglected productive questions when responding to the rise of digital toys in the early 2000s. The toymaker tried to diversify its way out of trouble, introducing several products in rapid succession. The initiatives themselves weren’t necessarily misguided, but each meant a stretch into an adjacent area, such as software (Lego Movie Maker), learning concepts (Lego Education), or clothing (Lego Wear). Collectively they far exceeded the company’s bandwidth, and Lego suffered record losses in 2003. The following year the incoming CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, shared his diagnosis of the problem with the board: “Rather than doing one adjacency every three to five years, we did three to five adjacencies every year.” He later told the MIT professor David Robertson, “Suddenly we had to manage a lot of businesses that we just didn’t understand. We didn’t have the capabilities, and we couldn’t keep up the pace.”