“We will cover issues ranging from people management (hiring, development), effective planning, decision-making, and measurement, plus identifying and implementing new initiatives to drive growth, efficiency, and quality.

 

To deliver sustained, scalable results, successful companies manage each of these issues using a set of formal, scalable processes, the combination of which defines a company’s Operating Cadence.

 

Jeff Bezos put it well in his 2016 shareholder letter. “Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right”.

 

OKRs are a good example here. We will introduce a series of scalable, repeatable processes that the audience can take back with them and implement within their own organizations.

 

Finally, we hope to convince the audience that the CEO (and their Execs) should not delegate the following decisions:

 

• Along what dimensions do we create value for customers, or what is our strategic direction? Best if articulated by a Good to Great Flywheel and should not change from quarter to quarter or year to year. Minor adjustments, based on results and experience, over a period of years are appropriate.

 

• How will the company measure success and progress against the flywheel or strategy (besides the obvious output metrics)?

 

• What are the input metrics that give us an understanding of and visibility into how we control and drive our desired customer experience and business performance?

 

• Where and how should we invest? How should we allocate our (precious) resources to the many initiatives and ventures we might pursue? And, which of these should we decide not to do based on the capacity of our organization?

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Every company should have an operating plan comprised of SMART goals for output and input metrics, initiatives, and how resources will be allocated (which teams get how many people, and how much money to spend).

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This sounds so simple, and in some ways, it is. But the difficulty achieving this increases in proportion to the size and complexity of the company.

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The answer isn’t new or a secret. It isn’t flashy or in the mainstream business zeitgeist. Every successful company has its own Operating Cadence– a set of processes and standards that dictate how plans are made, monitored, and altered.

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There are many different Operating Cadences to choose from. If you don't have one, you can learn and implement the one Amazon uses in this class.”