Can you tell about your previous career and how this led to founding Workboard ?
Can you tell about your previous career and how this led to founding Workboard ?
I ’ ve always been interested in solving process problems to increase revenue or results velocity and remove cost or risk – that ’ s been a central career theme from the roles I ’ ve had as well as the companies and product lines I ’ ve started or led .
After IBM acquired my last company in 2010 , I led a fast-growth global business there ; I found “ trickle down ” strategy alignment doesn ’ t work well and progress data doesn ’ t automatically “ trickle up ” in a large , global organisation . We spent a tonne of time and effort on town halls , operations reviews , status reports , collaboration sites , thousands of meetings and slide decks , yet had no single source of truth on the strategic priorities , current progress on key business metrics and how each team contributed to those priorities . I felt this was an essential requirement not only for management but for every employee who wants to be part of a company ’ s value creation equation . My co-founder and I did what entrepreneurs do : we validated that the problem was much broader
than any one company and created Workboard to address it . MIT Sloan has done a lot of recent research quantifying the problem : just 51 % of top executives understand the strategic priorities and it drops to 18 % at middle management and 13 % at front leads and supervisors . It ’ s obvious that if no one understands your strategy , you aren ’ t going to achieve it . As markets and market disruptors move faster , iterating and activating strategic priorities very quickly is now an imperative – or the organisation risks falling behind
10 April 2018