Decide and Deliver: Five Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization

Consider using a participative style, which generally works best.

The soft elements are different. They relate directly to the human beings who populate the organization.

Most companies spend a lot of time and effort engineering (and reengineering) their management and business processes. But they often do so without much attention to the decisions involved in each one.

The hard elements are those you can write down on paper or can map on a computer screen. The organization has a structure described by the boxes and lines on its organization chart. Individuals have job titles and role descriptions. The organization operates through processes, information flows, and metrics, and it employs a system of incentives. N

growth.” In all of these cases, the calendar-driven, business-unit-focused model is broken down into discrete, decision-focused pieces with specific timeframes.

In our experience, many companies can solve their organizational problems through clearer roles, better processes, and so forth—in

the organization’s animating spirit.

But executives must make strategic decisions continuously, whenever market or competitive conditions warrant.

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE for any organization is not just to fix individual decisions as we described in chapter 4. It is to create an environment where best practices happen naturally—where the whole organizational system supports people in making and executing good decisions quickly.