Move. Azzarello Patty

initiatives and sacrifice their long-term success by overreacting to short-term pressures. This is another reason why the hard part is in the Middle. Your team will naturally be skeptical, because let's face it, so many strategic initiatives have been abandoned before. Your team will be inclined to wait it out. They may even think that it's a safer bet to wait it out than to start working on new stuff, and risk falling behind when everyone else has switched back to the old stuff. So as a leader, you need to be brave and focused and keep reinforcing decisions to move forward when everyone is tempted to go back or to abandon new work to keep reacting to short-term pressures.

      E Is for Everyone

      Remember, you can lead a transformation from the top, but you can't implement a transformation from the top.

      Success requires everyone – not just management. Everyone. This is critical. To engage everyone requires that you fundamentally change how you think about communicating. Real engagement happens when communication is not just top-down from you, but is a conversation that involves everyone. You know you have communicated successfully when you are not the only one talking about it! People need to see that their peers have embraced the new strategy before they will feel safe to also get on board. They need to see and feel evidence of transformation throughout the whole Middle, so they will be personally motivated to keep going.

      Why Should You Read MOVE?

      MOVE is a successful leader's execution handbook, but because a key part of the MOVE model is to involve everyone, it is also an important guide for the whole organization. The whole organization will benefit from reading MOVE because your transformation must be planned and fueled from the beginning by engaging everyone in the process.

      CEOs, general managers, leaders of nonprofits, and any manager at any level aspiring to move their business forward will benefit from the ideas, lessons, and real-world examples in MOVE. And your whole team will also benefit from understanding what their role is in implementing the business strategy – because you can't get there without them. They actually hold the cards. So invite them in from the beginning.

      Where my prior book RISE was targeted at individual effectiveness and success, and how to create value and satisfaction in one's career, MOVE is targeted at organizational effectiveness and success: how to implement strategy, how to create business value, and how to develop focused, motivated, high-performing teams in one's business.

      You and your team could be reading this book because:

      ● You need to scale your business, but you can't seem to make it happen because everyone is so busy. Your organization has trouble prioritizing.

      ● You have been talking about important initiatives for a long time, but you are not accomplishing them. You are having trouble getting traction.

      ● You want to improve how your organization communicates, functions, and executes.

      ● You want to motivate and engage your team in a more powerful way. You want to see more ownership, accountability, and strategic decision making.

      ● You have the nagging sense that your business is not reaching its full potential.

      This Book Is Not Academic

      Everything I talk about in this book is based on real-world experience and examples. If you are looking to learn specific things you can do to MOVE your organization and strategy forward decisively, this is the book for you.

      PART 1

      M = THE MIDDLE

      WHERE TRANSFORMATIONS EITHER HAPPEN OR GET STUCK

      Latin proverb: Virtue is in the middle.

      It's easy to get excited at the beginning and define long-term goals at the end. It's the “Middle” that's the problem! It's hard to keep an organization focused on doing something new and difficult for a long time. Since real transformation takes time, you need a strategy to maintain execution and momentum through the Middle.

      CHAPTER 1

      THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE

      WHY NEW STRATEGIES STALL AFTER THE EXCITING KICKOFF

      Before we begin, let's talk about the very first moments of your new strategy. The beginning is great. You are clear, focused, ambitious, ready – and your motivation to move forward seems like the most natural and obvious thing in the world. This new initiative is seriously important to your company and your career. Everyone is on board. You are very committed.

      But at this point – at the beginning – it's important to realize that your new strategy is fragile. It hasn't taken hold yet. Think of the launch of your new strategy like your first week of a gym membership: Will you really go to the gym every week and transform your life? Or will you go back to your old habits, and get busy with all the other stuff in your life after the initial inspiration wears off?

      What you are facing is the long and vast abyss of the “Middle.” The Middle is where the transformation will happen – or not. One of the undeniable realities of the Middle is that it's the long part – and the simple, human fact is that:

      It's really hard for anyone, not to mention a whole organization, to stay focused and motivated on doing new and difficult things for a long time.

      This is the challenge your business transformation is facing. How will you and your team keep the focus and motivation to do the new, hard work every day, for the next 12–24 months, when it's just so much easier to…well…not to?

      As the leader of a transformation, you are committed and probably feeling substantial pressure to drive this transformation. You may have been brought into this role because others before you have failed. It is very clear in your mind where the business must go, and how it must transform to meet the needs of a changing market or new opportunity. You are ready to forge ahead. So you launch your new strategy with great fanfare in a big, company-wide, all-hands meeting with ice cream…

      What Everyone Is Thinking

      I've eaten the ice cream…

      This is a new thing I'm hearing about for the first time. It sounds like a new important strategy, but who knows for sure. I've seen new strategies come and go; most of the time it doesn't impact my life very much. In a few weeks or months, probably no one will be talking about this anymore. And since I'm already overworked, why bother investing more energy at this point. I'll just wait this one out.

      Tell Me If You've Been in This Meeting

      You're at a strategic off-site meeting to clarify your new strategy. You talk about the key, long-term things your business must invent, optimize, fix, change, or create. You use the words “game changing” and “innovative” when you talk about these ideas. You may have hired expensive consultants to create your new innovative and game changing strategy. There is tremendous investment, effort, and energy that goes into the beginning of a new strategy. Reaching the point of defining and aligning on a new strategy seems like a huge achievement in itself – and it is.

      But then…

      Everyone goes back to work.

      Everyone stays busy on what they were already working on.

      The new thing falls victim to the Middle.

      The beginning is really clear and strong, with lots of investment, excitement, and great intentions. And the end is really well defined. But the problem most strategies face is that there is no real plan for the Middle – which is where everything needs to happen!

      I have led several successful business transformations in my career. One of the things they all shared was a broken beginning and an inspiring end goal. But as with all transformations they also all shared a long, scary abyss in the Middle.

      I learned early on from mentors and trial and error that, if you want to get anything serious done, it's not the goal setting and strategy that is the problem. It's the doing. And the doing is hard because it takes doing for a long time. Without the element of time, there is