288. Strategic Investment: How CFOs Can Turn Vision into Results with Evan Campbell
Episode Details
Transcript
In this episode of CFO 4.0, Hannah Munro speaks with Evan Campbell, author of Adapt to Win, about the often-overlooked gap between strategy and execution. From allocating resources effectively to prioritising the right initiatives and measuring success, Evan shares practical insights for finance leaders looking to maximise returns on strategic investments. The discussion explores how CFOs can create alignment across the business, improve decision-making, and drive lasting competitive advantage.
Key topics include:
- Connecting strategy to investment decisions
- Portfolio management techniques for modern finance teams
- Avoiding common pitfalls in strategic execution
- Creating accountability across the organisation
- Making better decisions with limited resources
Links mentioned in episode:
- Evan's Linkedin
- Evan's book Adapt to Win
- Learn more about Chinoock Ranch Consulting
- Explore other CFO 4.0 Podcast episodes here.
- Subscribe to our Podcast!
Speaker 0
Welcome to CFO four point o, the future of finance. The CFO role is changing rapidly, moving from cost controller to strategic visionary. And with every change comes opportunity. We are here to help you take advantage of this transition to win at work, drive your career forwards, and lead with confidence. Join Hannah Munro, managing director of ITAS, a financial transformation consultancy, as she interviews key experts to give you real world advice and guidance on how to transform your processes, people, and data. Welcome to CFO four point o, the future of finance. Speaker 1
Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of CFO four point o. As usual, I'm your host, Hannah Munro. And with me today is Abin Campbell, who's the author of Adapt to Win. But not only is he an author, but he's also spent an I I won't I won't say the exact number of years, I think, but a long time jumping between both executive roles and consulting as well. So welcome, Evan. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. Speaker 2
Thank you, Hannah. I'm thrilled to be here with you and your audience. Speaker 1
So today, we're gonna just talk about, I guess, the connection between strategy and investment. Right? And you shared a brilliant stat with me just before the podcast around how seventy percent, I think it is, of strategic initiatives actually fail. And I guess that's a really that's a scary stat, isn't it? When we think of how much how important those initiatives are to the success of any business. Like so let's just start with that. Why do you think that is? Speaker 2
Yeah. I think, there there are a lot of reasons, but, a a key reason is, a a failure to effectively deploy a clear, understandable set of strategic objectives throughout the organization. You know, there there are three phases to to successful strategy. There's strategy development or formulation. There's strategy deployment, which is the decomposition and communication of those strategic objectives throughout the organization. And then there's strategy execution, which is tracking whether the investments we're making both in payroll and in CapEx and the rest of our investment portfolio are or are not realizing the objectives that justified those investments. And, what ends up happening a lot, in organizations that are weak in defining and deploying their strategy is, they fail to get the the focus and alignment of the people in the organization. And particularly in in more traditional organizations with lots of hierarchy and functional silos. The leaders of these functional silos, tend to control the goals and rewards, and they're not always aligned with each other. They often have parochial goals or objectives that they're that they have for their own, sphere of control, and, you know, they controlling the goals and rewards within their silo, they often prioritize those over strategic objectives of the company that would force a a strategic initiative almost by definition requires a tremendous amount of horizontal cooperation and collaboration across all of these silos to be accomplished. In any case, yeah, it's it's this lack of alignment and strategic focus that, causes these initiatives to fail at such high rates. Speaker 1
So, I guess, how how should that change how we deploy strategy or even start to think about strategy? You know, what should we as, you know, senior leaders be doing differently to ensure that these strategic initiatives are a success? Speaker 2
Right. Well, you know, I've been involved in strategy consulting for for quite a few years now. And, people often ask, you know, if I'm at a cocktail party and we're chatting and, oh, you do strategy consulting, you know, do you compete with, you know, McKinsey and BCG and all of these guys? And it's like, Speaker 1
no. Speaker 2
I I don't really compete with them. I kinda follow them around. And and I don't wanna say I clean up after them because they they do good work, but they're really focused on strategy deployment. I mean, what they do, you know, they they know an industry vertical. They've worked with every company in in such and such, a vertical or market. They have an enormous amount of information to help with, environmental analysis, competitor analysis, market analysis, and and they they're able to get high leverage out of, the those assets from one client to the next, we'll say. But but they're not interested in sticking around for the hard, dirty work of actually making that strategy that they've helped define into a reality. So my my typical client, I'm talking with the c suite, CEO, CFO, chief strategy officer, and, you know, you say, oh my gosh, Evan, you know, I'm so glad you're here. It's we we we, you know, our big shot consultants, we we spent two million dollars with them. They left a year and a half ago, and all I've got is this debt PowerPoint deck. And I I don't understand. I I, you know, I sent out, you know, the employee engagement survey, and only ten percent of the employees in the company know what our major goals are. I I did the town hall. I I printed up the coffee cups for everybody's desk. I sent out seven emails. How come? And, you know, the board's gonna realize we're not making the progress that that they think we are. That's the point where we really get talking about building the the disciplines, the processes, the skills, the accountabilities, for the for these key capabilities of strategy deployment and execution tracking in the organization. And, I introduce a term that's in the subtitle of my book, strategy decay. We're we're fighting these almost, forces of physics that exist in organizations, strategy decay and inertia. And leaders, anybody with a lot of experience in change management or transformation knows that leaders tend to overestimate their influence in the organization and underestimate the amount of effort and focus true change takes to implement. So, what I work to do strategy decay is essentially entropy inside the organization. If you think of your strategic intent, your objectives as the signal, there's always a lot of noise obfuscating, confusing, and distorting the signal of your strategic intent, especially as you get further down in the organization. And different types of organizations have a different level of chaos that is obfuscating the strategic signal, but you have to put enough energy. You know, entropy is this idea in physics that everything is falling apart and disordering and moving towards chaos. And you have to invest energy into a system to maintain order and overcome strategy decay. And then inertia is just your organization's tendency, to remain static, and it takes force to move any, organization in a different direction. And, you know, any strategic strategy implementation is, by definition, a new direction. So that's that's what strategy deployment and strategy execution are ultimately meant to accomplish so that you can achieve your strategic objectives. Speaker 1
So let's map that through then. What are the the key building blocks that we need to think about when going to execute? So we've got this great strategy. As you say, we may have paid these very impressive consultants lots of money to come up with these initiatives, or we may have done it ourselves. How do we how do we actually get, like you say, everybody aligned? What, you know, what what does that structure look like? Speaker 2
It's it's not easy, Hannah. And, this is where I think organizations very frequently struggle. Even if there's a great strategy. And and I'll say that a a b level strategy with a level execution will overcome a competitor with b level execution and an a level strategy every time. Mhmm. But the the oftentimes, you've got a pretty good strategy at the corporate level and maybe the business unit and some of the product p and l's, but there's often kind of a gap in the deployment of the strategy. As you get down to the day to day product managers and portfolio managers that are making important allocation decisions in the organization, they frequently don't you know, they they got the coffee cup, maybe it's printed on mission division on the back of his ID, but there isn't a steel thread that really allows them to make good investment decisions. And in the book, I I use objectives and key results. There are many, many strategy frameworks and processes out there. Lean oriented, push and connery, Salesforce uses v two mom. You know, there there are many many of them, and they can all work. They all have goals and they all have measures. OKRs have some philosophical advantages over some of the others that that I that make me prefer it. But the key thing is that your goals and measures are really clear and that they're being decomposed appropriately to each layer of the organization so that there's a steel thread of that strategy that gets down to these product managers and portfolio managers making tough trade off decisions. Right? Because what is portfolio management other than allocating very scarce resources to infinite demand for projects, initiatives, and investments. Right? So if we're not investing in accordance with our strategic objectives as a company, we're not pulling the most important lever of all towards achieving our strategic outcomes that we want as an organization. So, you know, don't don't show me your PowerPoint deck. Show me your portfolio your investment portfolio of initiatives and projects, and I'll tell you what people think your strategy is. Speaker 1
I think that's a really good point. And, obviously, we're we're speaking to CFOs here. Right? So, investment planning, planning the budget, planning the money that sits behind strategy is right up up their street. So talk to us about how we do that effectively. What does a good process look like to ensure that we've assessed and we've invested properly in these strategic initiatives? Speaker 2
So more than a third of the book is about portfolio management, enterprise portfolio management decision making. And, there are a whole I mean, I've got more than a decade working with some very bright, compatriots developing a a a fairly unique set of approaches to adaptive portfolio management. But the the I think the symptom that I saw again and again, and I'm I'm betting for a lot of CFOs and folks in FP and a, you might recognize some of this. A a product manager or a portfolio manager who is trying to make trade off decisions among very powerful stakeholders, sponsors who are advocating for their own initiatives and investments is in a very precarious political position to pick winners and losers. And in many cases, if there isn't clarity about the strategic objectives that are sufficient to really make, valuation decisions, from a strategic point of view, they fall back to a safe position of just using math that a monkey with a calculator can perform. You know, IRR, NPV. Alright? Well, by definition, a whole lot of disruptive and innovation type initiatives have no ROI. It it's not measurable. So what they end up doing is is they're funding cost takeout initiatives, you know, simple things that that save money or have a a quick short term easily measured ROI. And so they're starving these investment sectors like, innovation, disruption, new product development initiatives. And the company is losing competitiveness over a period of years because of this default safety behavior that the portfolio management is making. So the a lot of the focus of of the book and the work to help companies achieve their strategy is, how do I sign value, how do I prioritize initiative candidates based on their strategic impact, on their alignment with our strategic objectives as a company? And, some of the tech I can get into some of the techniques for that, but I'll I'll pause so I don't turn this into a one-sided soliloquy. Speaker 1
Oh, no. Absolutely. I think, I think I speak for our for our listeners when I say, please keep going. I think that the techniques and the practicalities of how we deploy is exactly what we wanna learn about. Speaker 2
Great. Well, I'll I'll touch on a couple of things. We we could turn this into a weekly series for a while if we were to go through the whole portfolio model. But, you know, the the first thing is, that we really want to start thinking more like a VC in a sense. Funding is a contingent event on performance meeting the objectives, the promised benefits of of that initiative. And not just that that initiative, once it's funded and underway, is achieving the benefit promise that the sponsor provided, but also that it continues to be the highest best use of those resources relative to new candidates that are coming in the queue to be assessed. Right? So funding's always contingent. In every quarter, reassessing the portfolio. And, you know, one of the first things I love to ask a client is, you know, tell me about the last couple initiatives you shot in the head. Some projects that you canceled before they were done. And a lot of organizations have a really hard time killing initiatives or projects that are no longer providing a high incremental yield for each month or quarter that they continue to run. And you have to have the organizational courage. I mean, that's where the adaptivity so much of the strategic adaptability comes from is the ability to free up resources when, you know, the marginal returns from continuing a project another quarter are no longer as high as the next opportunity. Right? So that's one of the first things I'd point to. Some of the other things that we try to do is, we want an efficient, fast, inexpensive portfolio management process where we can assess things in course grain granularity very quickly for the first cut of prioritization. Too many organizations, as in budgeting and in resource allocation are analyzing at much too fine grained a level and precision is not accuracy. It may convey the illusion of accuracy, but those are two different dimensions that do not relate to each other. And artificial precision is incredibly common in in budgeting and and funding decision making. But it's it's waste, it's expense that doesn't have a benefit. So let's let's understand exactly what precision we need to make the trade off decision that we're making at this stage of a multistage portfolio analysis process. At the point that we're actually assigning value to, an initiative candidate, let's let's take a moment to assign an investment sector to these to these. And and some of the typical investment sectors would be growth, cost takeout, a a regulatory necessity, or innovation. And we will have a more efficient and higher performing portfolio process if we recognize that comparing an innovation initiative to a simple cost takeout initiative, those are apples and oranges. And it it we can really help ourselves. If if we have investment allocation targets at at the highest level of the organization, we should be able to say business unit a is gonna get sixty percent of the investment because that's where our growth opportunity lies. Business unit b is gonna get thirty percent and then everything else gets ten. So at that point, we've already created efficiencies by, reducing competition between dissimilar business units. And then within those, we could say, we want a reserve eight percent for innovation initiatives so we're not falling behind competitively in this dynamic market. And in this business unit, which is very, slow and and moribund and is long in the tooth, it's a cash cow business, cost takeout is really our priority. So by understanding what investment sector, and what allocation percentages each sector should be getting in accordance with the strategy for that product line, that business unit, we can make things more efficient. We compare apples to apples. If we prioritize all the innovation initiatives against each other before we merge them with dissimilar types of initiative candidates, we save time, but we also preserve a certain amount of capacity for investment in things that are gonna be competitively advantageous. Speaker 1
That makes a lot of sense. And just going back to an earlier point that you made about precision, how do you know you've got the right level of precision for assessing a particular initiative? Right? Because you said, obviously, you can go too deep. So how do you know you've got it right? What are some of the, I guess, the signs that you've got it right and some of the signs that you've got it wrong? Speaker 2
That's a really good question, and it it probably is more art than science. But the simple the simplest answer to to, you know, to start with is, like, what what are we trying to do at this stage? Right? I think, given that I advocate strongly for a multistage portfolio process, this is, you know, the there's, seven or eight principles and seven or eight rules in in in the portfolio section, And they're all very inter especially the rules that are, you know, inviolate. Right? A principle is something, you know, we're gonna try to get along with the principle. The rule is, like, do this. So they're they're very interrelated. So this idea that I've I've seen many large organizations that analyze everything in in in the demand management side of the the intake side of the portfolio. They analyze everything at the same granularity from day one, and they're making all these fine grained decisions. Right? It's a terrible idea because, I I typically advocate a three or four stage intake process. So you've got this big funnel, which is just all the unprioritized ideas, and then and then you start to to create queues with with whip limits on them. Like, there can't be more than ten things at this stage in this queue, and it is stack ranked. And we're gonna pull from the top. And in the very first one, we're gonna do some very cursory course analysis. And we're probably not even gonna get that far into a benefit side of the business case for it. We're really just gonna start to do some costing because a sponsor, you know, who's got two or three initiatives that they'd really potentially like, and they know there's only room for one or two. If you just come back and say, you know, this one costs this and this one costs this, they'll make an instant decision that, you know, that from their subjective understanding of the benefit, which given they're the sponsor is is worth acknowledging has some value, they'll say, well, screw this one. I'm just gonna go with this one, you know, because I I I'm getting more juice for the squeeze. This is you know, the ROI of this one's better for me. Well, gee, you just killed half the candidates in your portfolio process without even having to do analysis of benefit side. So it's this kind of thinking that, you know, what is the coarsest, roughest number that allows me to kill off some candidates? That's really the question you're asking. Speaker 1
Yeah. So you you're looking to get rid of stuff more than actually keep stuff in. It's it's how do you how do you disqualify before you start qualifying in? Speaker 2
Yeah. What's the fastest, cheapest way I can kill off the bad initiatives? Speaker 1
And you talked about different stages. Right? So you talked about having stages at different ideas at different stages. Talk us through what those stages look like. Speaker 2
Yeah. It varies some, but, you know, so, typically, you've got your funnel, which is just blah, everything. And then you've got, the first analysis queue, which is really doing what I just said. You're you're starting you know, you're you're not saying this is, you know, seven thousand point four man days, you know. You're you're saying this is roughly forty man months, you know? Yeah. The the the measure that you pick is a crucial part of the precision. Right? The the metric, the actual measure that you're using will force you into using an appropriate precision. So that's an important decision in itself. Alright. Yeah. So at that point, we're saying, you know, this is n number of man months. This one's n n number of man months. This is a much better deal. Sponsors are killing some of their own initiatives, which is great. And then you're starting to get into more of the benefits side. This is this is where it's really important, a couple of things. You can't even do the first two if you don't understand your capacity. The organizational capacity for funds is relatively straightforward, but there are a lot of capacity constraints that organizations have that are influential. We're talking software development. You know, it's it's how how much you know, how many iterations or months worth of developer teams does this consume. It could be truck fleets. It could be capacity on container ships. It could be, molds in a foundry. I mean, all of these are capacity constraints that have to be acknowledged, and it is essential that the organization know what its throughput or capacity to deliver is, so that it can project forecasts on, what what a given initiative is gonna consume and and how much they can deliver. The other side of it is that we start to get into demand management. And this is where the discipline of, really having strategic clarity so that we're able to, prioritize according to strategic impact comes into play in those practices. And then, usually, the third cue is where we're really, merging dissimilar, types of initiatives, in accordance with our allocation targets. And, at that point, it's a queue where it's being pulled into work as capacity to deliver as available. Speaker 1
So let me just sum that back up and see if I understood the the different base. So the first one's kind of rough cut costings. Like, what's it gonna cost to do this? Second piece is, benefit and capacity assessment. You know, are we gonna get the value, and do we have the capacity, not just in terms of investment capacity, but also in terms of people capacity, whether that's specific resource that's gonna consume. And the third is then looking at the balance across the different types of investment, growth, etcetera, to make sure you've got the balance right to live the value for the organization. Speaker 2
Exactly. And let me add one more thing that's really important that a lot of organizations, don't do as much as I wish they would. Somewhere around that third stage potentially, things are getting tough. The trade off decisions are starting to get explicit. The sponsors and stakeholders are starting to get cranky that they're not getting everything they want, and the pressure's building on the organization. You know, you start to get this, you know, this behavior pounding, you're gonna you can take one. I know you're sandbagging me. You got capacity to do more than this. You're sandbagging me. Take one more initiative. I don't want this initiative. I'm a big shot executive. And, that behavior is pretty common, unfortunately. This is where, you know, having empirical measures of your actual capacity to live to deliver protect you. But, at that stage, the answer's not, okay, we'll try to take one more. The answer is, why don't we take a look at some of these initiatives and projects? A project in a traditional organization where getting funding up for a budget item is really hard and painful. A project that has a good ROI becomes a Christmas tree. Everybody starts hanging their favorite crap on it as it's coming through the process, and it's growing and getting more decorated and fancier. And at some point, you gotta say, look, man, you know, the Pareto rule says twenty percent of the features or twenty percent of the work on this, if it there are there are exceptions, but for a lot of kinds of initiatives, there there's a really disproportionate amount of the value that accrues from a relatively small amount of the effort or investment. And so, what if we took, you know, we we got guys who really want eight initiatives, but we've only got room for four. What if we take all of them, decompose them, pull apart the most valuable components, eject the least valuable components and rejigger the initiatives as a bunch of smaller higher value initiatives. Maybe we can get the most important parts of six or seven of them. Speaker 1
Mhmm. That's a really important point. Speaker 2
And you just really by doing that, by decomposing these things and reprioritizing the components thereof, you have dramatically increased your portfolio yields across the enterprise if you get good at doing that. Speaker 1
Yeah. I guess that's where the political skills come into play, though, because nor like you say, as as it's gone through the process, those decorations on that Christmas tree have been building. And convincing some of those owners to take those decorations off can be a challenge. So, have you got any tips for how we approach that and do that well? Well, Speaker 2
yeah. I mean, it's carrots and sticks. Mhmm. You know, the a couple things. I've learned the hard way, through painful experience that you really need to have your your delivery and fulfillment processes at a level of maturity that's pretty good before you put a lot of pressure on the demand management side of the equation. Because, you know, the the portfolio matching function where, you know, where the decisions about allocating scarce capacity to infinite demand is harrowing at best. But, you know, the the ways to survive that is is to be absolutely transparent, have rules that are published and clear and fair. And, you know, some of these other techniques like saying, you know, we we we as as an leadership group feel very strongly that seven percent of our investment capacity should go towards innovative cutting edge stuff on longer time horizons and not just, you know, stripping costs out of the call center. You know, those kinds of guidelines will help the portfolio managers defend the decisions that they're making. And, you know, at the point that it's like, you know, with all the baggage that this poor Christmas tree is carrying, it just isn't making the hurdle rate, or exceeding the net value of some of these others that are smaller. And, you know, you're you're you're in a position to, ask for some cooperation and collaboration because these these sponsors and stakeholders are all in competition with each other. And if they if they're able to behave in a more collaborative fashion, and I do tend to encourage more like participatory budgeting practices where there is a collaborative effort and they're working with each other as opposed to in isolation and in opposition. You'll get better outcomes and a more satisfied customer ultimately and higher portfolio returns, which, of course, is the, you know, the desire that we have across the whole organization. Speaker 1
So let's just so we've talked a lot about value, prioritization, making sure that we're investing in the right strategic initiatives, finding the balance between the different types of initiatives. Let's just skip slightly forward to going okay. So we've made some good choices. Right? We've allocated the right investment. How do we actually execute? Because I've seen some brilliant strategy that when it actually came to the shop floor, didn't didn't deliver. You know, it got so far down the track, and it just didn't quite make it. So how how do you actually execute once you've got post that investment stage? What are some of the, I guess, the the things that you need to have to ensure that that's successful? Those those I think you talked about, like, a silver a silver string, a thread of metal that goes through the organization to ensure that that makes it all the way down the chain. Speaker 2
Yeah. That's a it's it's a brilliant question because, this this is where peep so I talked about three critical capabilities the organization must develop in order to successfully realize its strategy. We talked a little about deploying the strategy successfully so that the goals are clear to everyone and decision and can drive decisions. And the last one's strategy execution tracking. It is the organization having enough governance and control capability to actually observe, you know, our company metaphorically is, you know, twenty Viking ships paddling furiously, you know, towards towards the objective. Oh, what do you know? Three of the Viking ships are full of little Vikings who are enthusiastically paddling straight into the rocks. They have locked their way. They're doing their best, but they're confused about the objective. You know? Strategy decay is set in. How quickly can the organization detect this deviation and intercede and get them back on track? Organizations that are really immature in strategy execution tend to do, set and forget objectives, quarterly. It's like at the beginning of the quarter, we're gonna set some objectives. At the end of the quarter, we're gonna discover we didn't make them, where we made some of them and we didn't make some of the others. The ability to intercede mid quarter, mid month, and get all of the happy little vikings back on course to the North Star is, strategy execution tracking. Well, guess what? You know, portfolio governments and strategy execution tracking are to a high degree, one in the same thing. Just with a slightly narrow focus narrower focus potentially on the portfolio. So, you know, when we've got an execution problem, when we've got a brilliant initiative that isn't performing in accordance with its, objectives. You know, everybody in portfolio management, at least theoretically, thinks that they're detecting a a failed project and they have a list of failed projects where they have increased governance and controls to inspect more often, try to intercede, see if it can get on track. Organizations don't kill the ones that are hopeless as quickly as they should. What went wrong? Did the sponsor exaggerate the benefit side of the business case? Let's impose a liar's discount in the next cycle where we recognize that, you know, certain sponsors overperform promises and certain underperform promises, and we can have a function in our, value assignment process that reflects that. But we've gotta be able to pull the plug on the ones that can't be solved in a reasonable time period to free up those resources for the next best opportunity coming in the queue. Speaker 1
So there's a there's some really interesting points in there. So I think in terms of key things to think about then is firstly, is that when you execute, how are you gonna measure? What are the checkpoints, the milestones that you're gonna see at different phases of that? And if you're not meeting that, like you say, having that great, that assessment of it, was it underinvested, overpromised? You know? And I I do love that, the discounts, the, the overvaluation discount when it comes to benefits for certain sponsors. I I I can think of one or two where that might be applicable. Speaker 2
Every everybody's met him or her. Speaker 1
Yeah. I think there's a few CFOs going, mhmm. I recognize that. And it also sounds like you say that the controls about how you monitor those initiatives. So, you know, do you have a do you use things like certain particular balanced scorecards, etcetera, to support this? Do you have a framework that you recommend around how you assess? Speaker 2
Well, yeah. I mean, I I'm still using OKRs. Right? So, you know, when I talk about OKRs being the steel thread from strategy to execution all the way down, there's every reason why you should have the whole point of OKRs in practice is being really deliberative about seeing that they ladder up and align with the strategic objectives of the company. And and I will emphasize without, you know, doing a deep dive on OKRs, the main difference between OKRs versus MBOs and a lot of the other seemingly superficially, similar methodologies is is it isn't a cascade from the top down onto the employ goals deposited upon the employees. It the philosophical difference that makes OKR so much more effective in practice is that the people in the organization are really engaged in the conversation and defining objectives that ladder up to the strategy of the product, the business unit, the company. Yeah. It it's not unsupervised, but and they're taking accountability because they're creating or defining the goals and understanding deeply how it fits into the organization's strategy and taking responsibility to align horizontally to make sure that they're successful. Right? Well, at at the initiative level, there's absolutely every reason, especially for the strategic components of the outcomes we're trying to get from the initiative, that there be objectives and of course measures, key results of of, of achieving those. Typically for a portfolio, I would recommend that the portfolio has a portfolio vision. You have portfolios within portfolios. Right? You've got the top enterprise portfolio. You've got a product line portfolio. You might have a departmental portfolio. You know, the the architecture of of crafting your portfolios is, sort of an art in itself. It usually results in lots of debate because there is no perfect there's no one right answer. It's always trading off different objectives to get the least bad. But each portfolio should have a portfolio vision and a value hypothesis. And the value of hypothesis, should be able to support OKRs that test that hypothesis, allow the hypothesis to pivot and adapt to achieve higher level value to deliver the portfolio vision. All of these things align to the corporate strategy. Speaker 1
So and and I think, that's in a brilliant place for me to ask one final question. So if you have to give, a, you know, a team going into perhaps a strategic initiative session, some top tips for how to ensure that they are, you know, choosing the right strategic initiatives. Do you wanna can you just give us a quick sum up of what you think they should be thinking about? Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, I'd I'd probably hit on my rules, but, you know, don't embrace artificial precision as an alternative to accuracy. Mhmm. Break large things down into small things because large things carry lots of garbage hidden inside. And tear them down. Prioritize ruthlessly. No two things have the same priority. You know, stack rank, and, and and know your capacity so that you can project cut lines onto those stack ranks for any arbitrary period of time in the future, or, you know, funding capacity level that you envision and thereby, force trade offs. Speaker 1
Brilliant. Well, thank you so much, Evan. Genuinely, it's been really great to have you on the show and for sharing your insights. I've certainly learned a lot, and I'm sure our listeners have as well. If people wanna learn more about you or find your book, where's the best place to to find find that? Speaker 2
So my book is available in all the usual, online places that you would buy a book, and it's available digital and hard copy published by Wiley. I would if you wanna learn more about it, look at the table of contents, read some samples and such. Go to go to the website for the book, adapt to win dot co, c o, not com, co. Speaker 1
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Evan. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. And, yeah, to our listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, then do please do leave us a review to share it on your favorite social or send me a message because it's great to to get your feedback on what you wanna hear more of. And and, again, thank you so much, Evan, for being with us today. Speaker 2
Thanks, Anna. It's been a lot of fun, and I've enjoyed it. Thank you so much. 
