Executive Interviews: Interview with Charles Spinosa on Strategy Execution
September 2008 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
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Charles Spinosa
Charles Spinosa,
Group Director Vision Consulting.

business and a customer, or between a purchasing person and a supplier. These agreements might be contractually binding, but that is not relevant to their execution.Most do not meet the standards of legal obligation; it is usually better to treat those that do meet those standards as informal anyway. There is always a customer who receives the promise and a performer who makes the promise. These roles will vary from promise to promise. The promise is personal, public (among colleagues), negotiated, voluntary, explicit, and focused by a shared concern or intention. For the purposes of strategy execution today, the informal structure of the promise is critical. That informal structure focuses on the reliability of the promise and shared concern of the customer and performer.

In a recent example, a senior vice president promised his chief executive that he would establish a new business line selling three financial products to a certain percentage of the companys clients customers within nine months. The power of the promise comes from the chief executives capacity to rely on it. Once he received the promise, he could focus his energies elsewhere. To see the power more clearly, compare the commercial promise to one made between a husband and wife. If one promises to purchase theater tickets, the other can stop thinking about the purchase and allocate time for other activities. The point is absolute reliability. But what exactly is the person who receives the informal promise relying on? Legally minded people will say that the customer relies on the fulfillment of the terms of the promise in our example, the percentage of customers, three financial products, and nine months or in the personal case, the tickets but that misses the point. The person who receives an informal promise relies absolutely on having his or her more general concern taken care of. That concern has to be well understood by the performer. In our example, for instance, the chief executives concern is to show the board and shareholders new business lines with double digit growth and low costs. The senior vice-president who performs shares this mission. If the shareholders or the board grows restless, the senior vice president might have to show growth sooner. If one product does particularly well, he might shift all energies to it. He is taking care of the concern not the terms. Likewise, in the personal case, the theater tickets might represent an affordable family evening out. If that is the concern and the ticket price has increased dramatically or if an opportunity arises to join some friends for a beach party, the performer will take care of the concern, not the terms by opting for the party.

We find that people feel a strong sense of obligation when they make promises for numerous reasons but primarily because they make promises inside relationships that they care about. The power of the informal promise for strategy execution depends precisely on the tendency for customers and performers to build the relationship with its shared intentions. With shared intentions, and the ultimate goal of taking care of the relationship, promises allow for the flexibility required by todays market dynamism. New competitive offerings arise. New competitors arise. Suppliers go out of business or change pricing structures. Customers change their longterm habits and values. Strategy execution today is rarely implementation of a template. It is always a promise to satisfy a strategic intent. Agile, informal promises create the relationship needed between the customer and the performer. Because of the felt obligation of the promise, performers form a relationship where they share intentions with their customers and can therefore act autonomously and responsibly. Just as the spouse knows when she needs to call about rearranging the tickets, so the SVP knows when to get advice before shutting down a product.

Why promise based strategic execution? Absolute reliability + flexibility!

• You have highlighted a threephase process for understanding and executing effective promisebased management. Can you share / illustrate what these three phases are and how companies should go about preparing themselves during each phase?
  Since requesting and making promises is a recurrent activity, we look at the completion of one promise as the beginning of the next, higher trust promise. We see the general structure of a promise, then, as a loop.

  We start, however, with a phase we call meeting of minds. The customer begins the process by deciding for herself what exactly she wants done and who is best to do it. Sometimes the phase starts more entrepreneurially with a performer getting clear about what a customer or group of customers want and how he can meet that need. This research leads to an offer to the customer instead of a request from the customer. Once a request or offer is made, both customer and performer clarify it, explain its value to each other, the business, and beyond. The performer generally talks about the resources he will use. Inside a business, the customer generally talks about the political situation and the space she will clear for the work. Both talk about the conditions of success, which are the basic terms of the promise. In short, they go back and forth to develop an agreement that they can both feel good about. The phase ends when the performer explicitly promises to deliver certain work to the customer at a certain time or declines or commits to promise or decline at a later time.

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