6GOVERNANCE

Robust governance should make it possible to travel the highways of strategy execution in clearly marked lanes at high speeds while minimizing risk and enhancing performance and agility.

Over one‐third of projects failed to achieve their goals. Each week, executives had approximately 30 hours of project meetings to attend. Even worse, each project manager ran the meeting differently and provided different reports. Decision making was fragmented with too many people involved in multiple levels of approvals. There was no clear process for executives to know what was expected of them. It drained a great deal of time from executives for little result. In a word, the approach was chaotic. The project management office (PMO) along with the project leaders were heads‐down trying to get things done, buried in resolving the day‐to‐day issues, disconnected from business strategy. All this resulted in low sales numbers on a new product, and increasing customer complaints and product recalls in this global industrial products company. It didn't take much for us to recognize the pain in this scenario was emanating from a lack of good governance.

Imagine if you had to drive like the old days on dirt roads that are not paved, on a terrain that is cracked and made ...

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