Who's in the Room? How Great Leaders

Is your company run by a team with no name? At the top of every organization chart lies a myth-that a Senior Management Team makes a companys critical decisions. The reality is that critical decisions are typically made by the boss and a small group of confidants-a "team with no name"-outside of formal processes. Meanwhile, other members of the management team wonder why they werent in the room or even consulted ahead of time. The dysfunction that results from this gap between myth and reality has led to years of unproductive team building exercises. The problems, Frisch shows, are ones of process and structure, not psychology. Whos In the Room is based on interviews with CEOs at organizations ranging from MasterCard to Ticketmaster to The Red Cross. Understand and embrace the way decision-making actually happens in their organizations Use these "teams with no names" to best advantage Engage the Senior Management Team in the three critical tasks for which it is ideally suited Organizations will get better decisions and superior results by unleashing the full potential of their Senior Management Teams. And bosses will see a dramatic drop-off in people coming into their offices asking, "Why wasnt I in the room?"

Bob Frisch, managing partner of The Strategic Offsites Group, has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to German mittelstand family businesses to the U.S. Department of State. Bob's work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Fortune.

Introduction: Who's in the Room?	p. 1
From Problem To Portfolio	p. 5
Most Companies Are Run by Teams with No Names	p. 7
The Myth of the Top Team
Illusion and Reality
The Problem That Isn't There, But Won't Go Away
Team Building Won't Solve the Problem	p. 21
When the Shrinks Go Marching In
After the Shrinks Have Gone
Don't Blame the Boss	p. 29
In Search of the Ideal Leader
Inside the Box
Do the "Rights" Thing
Four Fundamental Conflicts at the Heart of Senior Management Teams	p. 41
Mission Control Versus Knights of the Round Table: Functional Specialists or Reflections of the CEO?
The Team Versus the Legislature: The Representative from Finance, the Senator from Operations
The House Versus the Senate: Are Some More Equal Than Others?
The Majority Versus the Majority: The Impossibility of Deciding
Maybe the Problem Is That There Is No Problem
Case Study: How One CEO Transformed His Top Team	p. 57
The Past as Prologue
Moving from a Single Top Team to Multiple Teams
The Team That Sits Together Works Together
Tailoring the Structure to Suit Your Needs as a Leader
Best Practices: Design an Organization That Delivers the Outcomes You Need	p. 73
The Three Centers of Gravity
Flexing in Five Dimensions
The Portfolio and the Payoff
The Senior Management Team Unbound	p. 91
Engage the Senior Management Team in Three Critical Conversations No Other Team Can Have 93
Align the Senior Management Team Around a Common View of the World	p. 99
The Starting Point: Aligning Around Trends
Clustering Trends into Drivers of Change
Understanding Capabilities and Assets
Walking the Boundaries of the Company: Testing Walls and Fences
Defining and Selecting Opportunities
Prioritize and Integrate Initiatives to Hit the Strategic Bull's-Eye	p. 119
Asking the Nearly Impossible: Prioritizing Initiatives
The Real Source of the Difficulty
Changing the Conversation
It's All Relative
Hitting the Bull's-Eye: Making Initiatives Work Together
Move from "Should We Do This?" to "How Do We Do This?"	p. 145
It All Depends: Why Initiatives Fail
Putting on the Brakes: The Value of Parochialism
The American Red Cross: Managing Dependencies at the Speed of Disastet
Going from "Should" to "How"
Fixing What's Actually Broken
Tailor Your Portfolio of Teams for Top Performance Now	p. 167
Thinking It Through
Putting the New Approach into Motion
Repurposing the SMT Who's in the Room?
Acknowledgments	p. 179
The Author	p. 183
Index	p. 185
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Who's in the Room? How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them

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