288. Strategic Investment: How CFOs Can Turn Vision into Results with Evan Campbell

0:00Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance. The CFO role is changing rapidly, moving from cost controller to strategic visionary. And with every change comes opportunity. We are here to help you take advantage of this transition to win at work, drive your career forwards and lead with confidence. Join Hannah Munro, Managing Director of ITAS, a financial transformation consultancy, as she interviews key experts to give you real-world advice and guidance on how to transform your processes, people, and data. Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance.

0:48Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of CFO 4.0. As usual, I'm your host, Hannah Monroe. And with me today is Evan Campbell, who's the author of Adapt to Win. But not only is he an author, but he's also spent, I won't say the exact number of years, I think, but a long time jumping between both executive roles and consulting as well. So welcome, Evan. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. Thank you, Hannah. I'm thrilled to be here with you and your audience. So today we're going to just talk about, I guess, the connection between strategy and investment right and you shared a brilliant stat with me just before the podcast around how 70 i think it is of strategic initiatives actually fail um and i guess that's a really that's a scary stat isn't it when we think of how much how important those initiatives are to the success of any business like so let's just start with that why do you think that is yeah i think um There are a lot of reasons, but a key reason is a failure to effectively deploy a clear, understandable set of strategic objectives throughout the organization.

1:59You know, there are three phases to successful strategy. There's strategy development or formulation. there's strategy deployment which is the decomposition and communication of those strategic objectives throughout the organization and then there's strategy execution which is tracking whether the investments we're making both in payroll and in capex and the rest of our investment portfolio are or are not realizing the objectives that justified those investments and And what ends up happening a lot in organizations that are weak in defining and deploying their strategy is they fail to get the focus and alignment of the people in the organization.

2:43And particularly in more traditional organizations with lots of hierarchy and functional silos, the leaders of these functional silos tend to control the goals and rewards. And they're not always aligned with each other. They often have parochial goals or objectives that they have for their own sphere of control. And controlling the goals and rewards within their silo, they often prioritize those over strategic objectives of the company that would force. A strategic initiative, almost by definition, requires a tremendous amount of horizontal cooperation and collaboration across all of these silos to be accomplished.

3:30In any case, yeah, it's this lack of alignment and strategic focus that causes these initiatives to fail at such high rates. So I guess how should that change how we deploy strategy or even start to think about strategy? You know, what should we as senior leaders be doing differently to ensure that these strategic initiatives are a success? Right. Well, you know, I've been involved in strategy consulting for quite a few years now. And people often ask, you know, if I'm at a cocktail party and we're chatting and, oh, you do strategy consulting, you know, do you compete with, you know, McKinsey and BCG and all of these guys?

4:15And it's like, no, I don't really compete with them. I kind of follow them around. And I don't want to say I clean up after them because they do good work, but they're really focused on strategy deployment. I mean, what they do, you know, they know an industry vertical. They've worked with every company in such and such a vertical or market. They have an enormous amount of information to help with environmental analysis, competitor analysis, market analysis. And they're able to get high leverage out of those assets from one client to the next, we'll say. But they're not interested in sticking around for the hard, dirty work of actually making that strategy that they've helped define into a reality.

5:02So my typical client, I'm talking with the C-suite, CEO, CFO, chief strategy officer. And, you know, you say, oh, my gosh, Evan, you know, I'm so glad you're here. We, you know, our big shot consultants, we spent$2 million with them. They left a year and a half ago. And all I've got is this debt PowerPoint deck. And I don't understand. I, you know, I sent out, you know, the employee engagement survey. and only 10 % of the employees in the company know what our major goals are. I did the town hall. I printed up the coffee cups for everybody's desk. I sent out seven emails. How come? And, you know, the board's going to realize we're not making the progress that they think we are.

5:47That's the point where we really get talking about building the disciplines, the processes, the skills, the accountabilities for these key capabilities of strategy deployment and execution tracking in the organization. And I introduce a term that's in the subtitle of my book, strategy decay. We're fighting these almost forces of physics that exist in organizations, strategy decay and inertia. And leaders, anybody with a lot of experience in change management or transformation knows that leaders tend to overestimate their influence in the organization and underestimate the amount of effort and focus true change takes to implement.

6:35So what I work to do, strategy decay is essentially entropy inside the organization. If you think of your strategic intent, your objectives as the signal, there's always a lot of noise obfuscating, confusing, and distorting the signal of your strategic intent, especially as you get further down in the organization. And different types of organizations have a different level of chaos that is obfuscating the strategic signal. But you have to put enough energy. Entropy is this idea in physics that everything is falling apart and disordering and moving towards chaos. And you have to invest energy into a system to maintain order and overcome strategy decay.

7:25And then inertia is just your organization's tendency to remain static. And it takes force to move any organization in a different direction. And, you know, any strategy implementation is, by definition, a new direction. So that's what strategy deployment and strategy execution are ultimately meant to accomplish so that you can achieve your strategic objectives. So let's map that through then. What are the key building blocks that we need to think about when going to execute? So we've got this great strategy. As you say, we may have paid these very impressive consultants lots of money to come up with these initiatives.

8:05games, or we may have done it ourselves. How do we actually get, like you say, everybody aligned? What does that structure look like? It's not easy, Hannah. And this is where I think organizations very frequently struggle, even if there's a great strategy. And I'll say that a B-level strategy with A-level execution will overcome a competitor with B-level execution and an A-level strategy every time.

8:40But oftentimes you've got a pretty good strategy at the corporate level and maybe the business unit and some of the product P &Ls. But there's often kind of a gap in the deployment of the strategy. As you get down to the day-to-day product managers and portfolio managers that are making important allocation decisions in the organization, they frequently don't, They got the coffee cup. Maybe it's printed on Mission Vision on the back of his ID. But there isn't a steel thread that really allows them to make good investment decisions. And in the book, I use objectives and key results. There are many, many strategy frameworks and processes out there.

9:25Lean-oriented, Hoshin Connery. Salesforce uses V2 Mom. You know, there are many, many of them and they can all work. They all have goals and they all have measures. OKRs have some philosophical advantages over some of the others that make me prefer it. But the key thing is that your goals and measures are really clear and that they're being decomposed appropriately to each layer of the organization so that there's a steel thread of that strategy that gets down to these product managers and portfolio managers making tough tradeoff decisions, right? Because what is portfolio management other than allocating very scarce resources to infinite demand for projects, initiatives, and investments, right?

10:15So if we're not investing in accordance with our strategic objectives as a company, we're not pulling the most important lever of all towards achieving our strategic outcomes that we want as an organization. So, you know, don't show me your PowerPoint deck. Show me your portfolio, your investment portfolio of initiatives and projects, and I'll tell you what people think your strategy is. And I think that's a really good point. And obviously, we're speaking to CFOs here, right? So investment, planning, planning the budget, planning the money that sits behind strategy is right up their street. So talk to us about how we do that effectively.

10:58What does a good process look like to ensure that we've assessed and we've invested properly in these strategic initiatives? So more than a third of the book is about portfolio management, enterprise portfolio management decision making. and uh there are a whole i mean i've got more than a decade working with some very bright um compatriots developing a fairly unique set approaches to adaptive portfolio management um but the the i think the symptom that i saw again and again and i'm i'm betting for a lot of CFOs and folks in FP &A, you might recognize some of this. A product manager or a portfolio manager who is trying to make trade-off decisions among very powerful stakeholders, sponsors, who are advocating for their own initiatives and investments is in a very precarious political position to pick winners and losers.

12:09And in many cases, if there isn't clarity about the strategic objectives that are sufficient to really make valuation decisions from a strategic point of view, they fall back to a safe position of just using math that a monkey with a calculator can perform, you know, IRR, NPV, right? Well, by definition, a whole lot of disruptive and innovation type initiatives have no ROI. It's not measurable. So what they end up doing is they're funding cost takeout initiatives, you know, simple things that save money or have a quick short term, easily measured ROI. And so they're starving these investment sectors, like innovation, disruption, new product development initiatives.

13:03And the company is losing competitiveness over a period of years because of this default safety behavior that the portfolio management is making. So a lot of the focus of the book and the work to help companies achieve their strategy is how do I assign value? how do I prioritize initiative candidates based on their strategic impact, on their alignment with our strategic objectives as a company? And I can get into some of the techniques for that, but I'll pause so I don't turn this into a one-sided soliloquy. Oh, no, absolutely. I think I speak for our listeners when I say, please keep going. I think the techniques and the practicalities of how we deploy is exactly what we want to learn about.

13:53Great. Well, I'll touch on a couple of things. We could turn this into a weekly series for a while if we were to go through the whole portfolio model. But, you know, the first thing is that we really want to start thinking more like a VC in a sense. Funding is a contingent event on performance meeting the objectives, the promise benefits of that initiative. And not just that that initiative, once it's funded and underway, is achieving the benefit promise that the sponsor provided, but also that it continues to be the highest best use of those resources relative to new candidates that are coming in the queue to be assessed.

14:44Right. So funding is always contingent in every quarter, reassessing the portfolio. And, you know, one of the first things I love to ask a client is, you know, tell me about the last couple of initiatives you shot in the head, some projects that you canceled before they were done. And a lot of organizations have a really hard time killing initiatives or projects that are no longer providing a high incremental yield for each month or quarter that they continue to run. And you have to have the organizational courage. I mean, that's where the adaptivity, so much of the strategic adaptability comes from is the ability to free up resources when, you know, the marginal returns from continuing a project another quarter are no longer as high as the next opportunity.

15:32Right. So that's one of the first things I'd point to. Um, some of the other things that we try to do is, um, we want an efficient, fast, uh, inexpensive portfolio management process where we can assess things in coarse grained granularity very quickly for the first cut of prioritization. Too many organizations in budgeting and in resource allocation are analyzing at much too fine-grained a level, and precision is not accuracy. It may convey the illusion of accuracy, but those are two different dimensions that do not relate to each other. And artificial precision is incredibly common in budgeting and funding decision-making.

16:22But it's waste, it's expense that doesn't have a benefit. So let's understand exactly what precision we need to make the trade-off decision that we're making at this stage of a multi-stage portfolio analysis process. process. At the point that we're actually assigning value to an initiative candidate, let's take a moment to assign an investment sector to these. And some of the typical investment sectors would be growth, cost takeout, a regulatory necessity, or innovation. And we will have a more efficient and higher performing portfolio process if we recognize that comparing an innovation initiative to a simple cost takeout initiative, those are apples and oranges.

17:26And we can really help ourselves. If we have investment allocation targets at the highest level of the organization, we should be able to say business unit A is going to get 60 % of the investment because that's where our growth opportunity lies. Business unit B is going to get 30 % and then everything else gets 10. So at that point, we've already created efficiencies by reducing competition between dissimilar business units. And then within those, we can say we want to reserve 8 % for innovation initiatives so we're not falling behind competitively in this dynamic market. And in this business unit, which is very slow and moribund and is long in the tooth, it's a cash cow business, cost takeout is really our priority.

18:15So by understanding what investment sector and what allocation percentages each sector should be getting in accordance with the strategy for that product line, that business unit, we can make things more efficient. we compare apples to apples. If we prioritize all the innovation initiatives against each other, before we merge them with dissimilar types of initiative candidates, we save time, but we also preserve a certain amount of capacity for investment in things that are going to be competitively advantageous. That makes a lot of sense. And just going back to an earlier point that you made about precision, how do you know you've got the right level of precision for assessing a particular initiative, right?

19:01Because you said, obviously, you go too deep. So how do you know you've got it right? What are some of the, I guess, the signs that you've got it right and some of the signs that you've got it wrong? That's a really good question. And it probably is more art than science. But the simplest answer to start with is, Like, what are we trying to do at this stage, right? I think given that I advocate strongly for a multi-stage portfolio process, this is, you know, there's seven or eight principles and seven or eight rules in the portfolio section. And they're all very, especially the rules that are, you know, inviolate, right?

19:45a principal something, you know, we're going to try to get along with the principal. The ruler is like, do this. So they're very interrelated. So this idea that I've seen many large organizations that analyze everything in the demand management side of the intake side of the portfolio, they analyze everything at the same granularity from day one, and they're making all these fine-grained decisions, right? It's a terrible idea because I typically advocate a three or four stage intake process. So you've got this big funnel, which is just all the unprioritized ideas. And then you start to create queues with width limits on them.

20:31Like there can't be more than 10 things at this stage in this queue, and it is stack ranked. And we're going to pull from the top. And in the very first one, we're going to do some very cursory course analysis. And we're probably not even going to get that far into a benefit side of the business case for it. We're really just going to start to do some costing because a sponsor, you know, who's got two or three initiatives that they'd really potentially like, and they know there's only room for one or two. If you just come back and say, you know, this one costs this and this one costs this, they'll make an instant decision that, you know, that from their subjective understanding of the benefit, which given they're the sponsor is worth acknowledging has some value.

21:20They'll say, well, screw this one. I'm just going to go with this one, you know, because I'm getting more juice for the squeeze. This is, you know, the ROI of this one's better for me. Well, gee, you just killed half the candidates in your portfolio process without even having to do analysis of benefit side. So it's this kind of thinking that, you know, what is the coarsest, roughest number that allows me to kill off some candidates? That's really the question you're asking. Yeah. So you're looking to get rid of stuff more than actually keep stuff in. It's how do you disqualify before you start qualifying in?

21:57yeah what's the fastest cheapest way i can kill off the bad initiatives and you talked about different stages right so you talked about having stages at different ideas at different stages talk us through what those stages look like yeah it varies some but you know so typically you've got your funnel which is just blah everything and then you've got um the first analysis cue which is really doing what i just said you're you're starting you know you're you're not saying this is, you know, 7 ,000.4 man days, you know, you're, you're saying this is roughly 40 man months, you know, um, the, the, the measure that you pick is a crucial part of the precision, right?

22:47The metric, the actual measure that you're using will force you into using an appropriate precision. So that's an important decision in itself. All right. So at that point, we're saying, you know, this is end number of man months. This one's end number of man months. This is a much better deal. Sponsors are killing some of their own initiatives, which is great. And then you're starting to get into more of a benefit side. This is where it's really important. A couple of things. You can't even do the first two if you don't understand your capacity. The organizational capacity for funds is relatively straightforward, but there are a lot of capacity constraints that organizations have that are influential.

23:32If we're talking software development, you know, it's how much, you know, how many iterations or months worth of developer teams does this consume? It could be truck fleets. It could be capacity on container ships. It could be molds in a foundry. I mean, all of these are capacity constraints that have to be acknowledged, and it is essential that the organization know what its throughput or capacity to deliver is so that it can project forecasts on what a given initiative is going to consume and how much they can deliver. The other side of it is that we start to get into demand management. And this is where the discipline of really having strategic clarity so that we're able to prioritize according to strategic impact comes into play in those practices.

24:30And then usually the third cue is where we're really merging dissimilar types of initiatives in accordance with our allocation targets. And at that point, it's a queue where it's being pulled into work as capacity to deliver is available. So let me just sum that back up and see if I understood the different basics. So the first one's kind of rough cut costings, like what's it going to cost us to do this? Second piece is benefit and capacity assessment. You know, are we going to get the value and do we have the capacity, not just in terms of investment capacity, but also in terms of people capacity, whether that's a specific resource that's going to consume.

25:18And the third is then looking at the balance across the different types of investment, growth, et cetera, to make sure you've got the balance right to deliver the value for the organization. Exactly. And let me add one more thing that's really important that a lot of organizations don't do as much as I wish they would. Somewhere around that third stage, potentially, things are getting tough. The tradeoff decisions are starting to get explicit. The sponsors and stakeholders are starting to get cranky that they're not getting everything they want. And the pressure's building on the organization.

25:52you know, you start to get this, you know, this behavior pounding. You're going to, you can take one. I know you're sandbagging me. You got capacity to do more than this. You're sandbagging me. Take one more initiative. I want this initiative. I'm a big shot executive. And, uh, that behavior is pretty common. Uh, unfortunately this is where, you know, having empirical measures of your actual capacity to live, to deliver, protect you. But, um, at that stage, the answer is not, okay, we'll try to take one more. The answer is, why don't we take a look at some of these initiatives and projects? A project in a traditional organization where getting funding for a budget item is really hard and painful.

26:35A project that has a good ROI becomes a Christmas tree. Everybody starts hanging their favorite crap on it as it's coming through the process and it's growing and getting more decorated and fancier. And at some point you got to say, look, man, you know, the Pareto rule says 20 % of the features or 20 % of the work on this, there are exceptions, but for a lot of kinds of initiatives, there's a really disproportionate amount of the value that accrues from a relatively small amount of the effort or investment. And so what if we took, You know, we got guys who really want eight initiatives, but we've only got room for four.

27:20What if we take all of them, decompose them, pull apart the most valuable components, eject the least valuable components, and rejigger the initiatives as a bunch of smaller, higher-value initiatives? Maybe we can get the most important parts of six or seven of them. That's a radiant point. point and point and you just really by doing that by decomposing these things and reprioritizing the components thereof you have dramatically increased your portfolio yields across the enterprise if you get good at doing that yeah i guess that's where the political skills coming to play though because nor like you say as as it's gone through the process those decorations on that christmas tree have been building and convincing some of those owners to take those decorations off can be a challenge.

28:12So have you got any tips for how we approach that and do that well? Well, yeah, I mean, it's carrots and sticks. Um, you know, the, a couple things, um, I've learned the hard way, uh, through painful experience that you really need to have your delivery and fulfillment processes at a level of maturity that's pretty good before you put a lot of pressure on the demand management side of the equation. Because, you know, the portfolio matching function where, you know, where the decisions about allocating scarce capacity to infinite demand is harrowing at best. But, you know, the ways to survive that is to be absolutely transparent, have rules that are published and clear and fair.

29:08And, you know, some of these other techniques like saying, you know, we as a leadership group feel very strongly that 7 % of our investment capacity should go towards innovative cutting edge stuff on longer time horizons and not just, you know, stripping costs out of the call center. Um, you know, those kinds of guidelines will help the portfolio managers defend the decisions that they're making. And, you know, at the point that it's like, you know, with all the baggage that this poor Christmas tree is carrying, it just isn't making the hurdle rate, um, or exceeding the net value of some of these others that are smaller.

29:50And, you know, you're in a position to ask for some cooperation and collaboration because these sponsors and stakeholders are all in competition with each other. And if they're able to behave in a more collaborative fashion, and I do tend to encourage more like participatory budgeting practices where there is a collaborative effort and they're working with each other as opposed to in isolation and in opposition, you'll get better outcomes and a more satisfied customer ultimately and higher portfolio returns, which of course is the desire that we have across the whole organization. So let's just, so we've talked a lot about value, prioritization, making sure that we're investing in the right strategic initiatives, finding the balance between the different types of initiatives.

30:43Let's just skip slightly forward to going, okay, so we've made some good choices, right? We've allocated the right investment. How do we actually execute? Because I've seen some brilliant strategy that when it actually came to the shop floor, didn't deliver. You know, it got so far down the track and it just didn't quite make it. So how do you actually execute once you've got post that investment stage? What are some of the, I guess, the things that you need to have to ensure that that's successful? I think you talked about like a silver string, a thread of metal that goes through the organization to ensure that that makes it all the way down the chain.

31:22Yeah, it's a brilliant question because this is where people. So I talked about three critical capabilities the organization must develop in order to successfully realize its strategy. We talked a little about deploying the strategy successfully so that the goals are clear to everyone and can drive decisions. And the last one is strategy execution tracking. It is the organization having enough governance and control capability to actually observe, you know, our company metaphorically is, you know, 20 Viking ships paddling furiously, you know, towards the objective. Oh, what do you know? Three of the Viking ships are full of little Vikings who are enthusiastically paddling straight into the rocks.

32:19They have lost their way. They're doing their best, but they're confused about the objective. You know, strategy decay is set in. How quickly can the organization detect this deviation and intercede and get them back on track? Organizations that are really immature in strategy execution tend to do set and forget objectives quarterly. It's like at the beginning of the quarter, we're going to set some objectives. At the end of the quarter, we're going to discover we didn't make them. Where we made some of them, we didn't make some of the others. The ability to intercede mid-quarter, mid-month and get all of the happy little Vikings back on course to the North Star is strategy execution tracking.

33:03Well, guess what? Portfolio governance and strategy execution tracking are, to a high degree, one and the same thing, just with a slightly narrower focus potentially on the portfolio. So, you know, when we've got an execution problem, when we've got a brilliant initiative that isn't performing in accordance with its objectives, you know, everybody in portfolio management, at least theoretically, thinks that they're detecting a failed project and they have a list of failed projects where they have increased governance and controls to inspect more often, try to intercede, see if it can get on track.

33:48organizations don't kill the ones that are hopeless as quickly as they should. What went wrong? Did the sponsor exaggerate the benefit side of the business case? Let's impose a liar's discount in the next cycle where we recognize that, you know, certain sponsors overperform promises and certain underperform promises. And we can have a function in our value assignment process that reflects that. but we've got to be able to pull the plug on the ones that can't be solved in a reasonable time period to free up those resources for the next best opportunity coming in the queue. So there's some really interesting points in there.

34:33So I think in terms of key things to think about then is firstly, is that when you execute, how are you going to measure? What are the checkpoints, the milestones that you're going to see at different phases of that? And if you're not meeting that like you say having that great um that assessment of it was it under invested over promised you know and I do love that um the discount the uh the overvaluation discount when it comes to benefits for certain sponsors I I can think of one or two where that might be applicable um everybody's met him or her idea i think it was a few cfers going i recognize that um and it also sounds like you say that the controls about how you monitor those initiatives so you know do you have a do you use things like certain particular balance scorecards etc to support this do you have a framework that you recommend around how you assess?

35:33Well, yeah. I mean, I'm still using OKRs, right? So, you know, when I talk about OKRs being the steel thread from strategy to execution all the way down, there's every reason why you should have... The whole point of OKRs in practice is being really deliberative about seeing that they ladder up and align with the strategic objectives of the company. And I will emphasize without, you know, doing a deep dive on OKRs, the main difference between OKRs versus MBOs and a lot of the other seemingly superficially similar methodologies is it isn't a cascade from the top down onto the goals deposited upon the employees.

36:22The philosophical difference that makes OKR so much more effective in practice is that the people in the organization are really engaged in the conversation and defining objectives that ladder up to the strategy of the product, the business unit, the company. it's not unsupervised, but, and they're taking accountability because they're creating or defining the goals and understanding deeply how it fits into the organization's strategy and taking responsibility to align horizontally to make sure that they're successful, right? Well, at the initiative level, there's absolutely every reason, especially for the strategic components of the outcomes we're trying to get from the initiative, that there be objectives and, of course, measures, key results of achieving those.

37:17Typically, for a portfolio, I would recommend that the portfolio has a portfolio vision. You have portfolios within portfolios, right? You've got the top enterprise portfolio. You've got a product line portfolio. You might have a departmental portfolio. You know, the architecture of crafting your portfolios is sort of an art in itself. It usually results in lots of debate because there is no perfect, there's no one right answer. It's always trading off different objectives to get the least bad. But each portfolio should have a portfolio vision and a value hypothesis. And the value of hypothesis should be able to support OKRs that test that hypothesis, allow the hypothesis to pivot and adapt to achieve higher level value to deliver the portfolio vision.

38:11All of these things align to the corporate strategy. So, and I think that's in a brilliant place for me to ask one final question. So if you have to give a team going into perhaps a strategic initiative session some top tips for how to ensure that they are choosing the right strategic initiatives, can you just give us a quick sum up of what you think they should be thinking about? Yeah, I mean, I'd probably hit on my rules, but, you know, don't embrace artificial precision as an alternative to accuracy. Break large things down into small things because large things carry lots of garbage hidden inside and tear them down.

39:05Prioritize ruthlessly. No two things have the same priority. You know, stack rank and know your capacity so that you can project cut lines onto those stack ranks for any arbitrary period of time in the future or, you know, funding capacity level that you envision and thereby force tradeoffs. brilliant well thank you so much evan genuinely it's been really great to have you on the show and for sharing your insights um i've certainly learned a lot and i'm sure our listeners have as well um if people want to learn more about you or find your book um where's the best place to to find find that so my book is available in all the usual uh online places that you would buy a book and it's available digital and hard copy published by Wiley.

40:02Um, I would, if you want to learn more about it, look at the table of contents, uh, read some samples and such, go to, go to the website for the book, adapt to win.co, C O not com co. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Evan. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show and, uh, yeah, to our listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, then please do leave us a review to share it on your favorite social or send me a message because it's great to get your feedback on what you want to hear more of. And again, thank you so much, Evan, for being with us today. Thanks, Anna. It's been a lot of fun and I've enjoyed it.

40:41Thank you so much.

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