Mastering the Cube Quotes

“Leadership groups need to jointly articulate their value propositions, struggle together to define trade-offs, and haggle over what work in the organization is and is not of the greatest marketplace value. It is in these difficult but exhilarating discussions that thinking changes and harmonizes at the leadership level.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The capabilities that have brought firms laurels in the past will sabotage them in the future if they cannot supplement them or replace them with new sets of organizing choices that produce fresh new capabilities.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“As Harvard Business School professor and author Clayton Christensen has taught, successful companies will get pushed aside if they do not hearken to the threat of disruptive innovations and adjust their strategies in response. We would emphasize that strategic change is not what’s hard. What’s really hard is organizational change to accommodate strategie change. Processes, structures, measures, information systems, people systems, continuous improvement protocols, and cultural beliefs all must coalesce around a new strategic idea, or it will never deliver the desired results.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Continual, systemic alignment assessments are needed both to identify and amplify small pockets of innovation and to tune up the whole enterprise.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Our colleague Adam Anderson calls this marriage of strategic planning and organization alignment liquid design. The term indicates that large enterprises can and should be in a constant state of change as divisions or groups within divisions are continuously renewed and realigned. In this approach to planning, profit center heads are masters of launching and leading organization alignment. They report on misalignments within their divisions and ensure new processes, structures, or other practices are funded or existing ones adjusted to produce the strategic capabilities required by the business.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“We would like to see one of the primary deliverables from [our next] project be a repeatable process that we can fold into our long-term planning process, instead of having it as a one-off type of project.” Companies like this want their profit center leaders to develop continuous alignment know-how.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“I would say that the organization has to align to the future state,” says Abbott. “More often than not, what you find is organizations are aligned to where you've been, not where you’re going.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Continuous organization alignment should feel natural and comfortable, just one of the ongoing activities that come with running a company. People should be able to continue to run the business while engaged in alignment; indeed, alignment should feel like the everyday innovative work of responding to changes in the environment and in the customer. Thus, rather than coveting a perfect design that never has to change again, alignment leaders should be helping their organizations strengthen the muscle of ongoing organization alignment.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“As leaders identify necessary strategic changes or declining organization performance, they respond by launching organization changes. If necessary, they take the plunge on major transformations when triggered by one of the legitimate reasons we discussed above. But short, targeted adjustments can keep an organization on track between major strategic shifts. By making incremental change on a constant basis, leaders can lengthen the time between large-scale realignments.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The set of upsides and downsides that characterize your organization have an expiration date.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Simplicity for the customer first; simplicity for the organization second.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The folks who make up the workforce crave simplicity at work just as much as consumers crave simplicity in what they purchase. But it is an irrefutable reality that someone along the value chain is going to have to do new work to absorb added complexity. Enter Building Block 7: Absorb complexity for your”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Offerings that help people bypass the clutter are often called solutions. Solution-based offerings bundle goods and services together so the customer does not have to spend the time sorting through individual items, making choices about which are preferable, and assembling them for the job to be done.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“offering simplicity within a complex domain is likely to be so appreciated and valued by customers that it ends up being perceived as a luxury.”3”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Nearly without exception, the companies we work with are morphing their offerings to help customers bypass the clutter. They have recognized that in the sea of choice that surrounds us, the offerings that are simplest from the customer’s perspective are often the winningest.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Protect strategically vital work from becoming engulfed by the transactional work that characterizes so much of what must get done on a daily basis.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Many functional groups fall into sheer and utter chaos because of misalignment (to their own dismay). They are not clear about how they hook up to enterprise strategy, and so their processes, structures, roles and responsibilities, and staffing are way out of line with what generates income in the marketplace. And they know it—people inside these functional failures often feel extraordinarily frustrated and cynical.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The other caution has to do with coordinating what work is phased out as a result of lower staffing levels. Leaders often let any such phasing out proceed of its own accord because they have faith that when they eliminate layers in the organizational chart or increase leadership spans of control, people who feel the increased workload will wisely and naturally eliminate tasks that are non-value added or of reduced competitive importance. But this faith is misplaced if employees are not clear about the relative value of work or what the strategic trade-offs should be. If they do not know what work to eliminate, they may not eliminate any at all and instead pass it on to someone else. In this way the organization chart is like a square of jiggly jelly. If you squeeze the jelly from the top and the bottom, it is going to squelch out the sides, and if you squeeze from the sides, it is going to squelch out the top and the bottom. Increasing spans of control—giving leaders more responsibility—may soon result in more layers (for example, one firm created “senior technician” roles for technicians to fill as intermediaries for busy managers). Decreasing layers of the organizational chart may increase spans of control (for example, another company eliminated a layer of managers but then hired a couple of new directors to handle the additional workload when all the reports were reassigned to the next highest management level). The total headcount dollars are never reduced, just reapportioned.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The performance goal of work with the designation of non-competitive is simply to be at par. Average is best. An industry average to gauge reasonable staffing levels makes a lot of sense in this case.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Spending where you shouldn’t prevents you from investing where you should.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Cost cutting is an organization alignment challenge because it impacts many systems that work together to contribute to organization results—among them work routines, job design, and staffing. When it is time to raise revenues or cut costs, decisions should be made that align with the strategic priorities. All work is not strategically equal.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“It is easy to buy into exciting new strategies that promise to take you into the insanely awesome future. “We’re going to differentiate ourselves by customer experience. Woot! Woot!” It is a downer to make the trade-offs. “We’re moving heads and budgets from the juggernaut divisions of the past to fund the skunkworks and startups of the future.” Ouch, that hurts.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Part of their approach involved making structure change to group competitive work more tightly together and separate it from noncompetitive work. The mind-set required by the two workforces is different—one to strive toward differentiation and excellence, one to aim for extraordinary efficiency. Non-competitive work is not necessarily less important—many non-strategic tasks, such as payroll, sales administration, and network operations, are absolutely crucial for running the business. But non-competitive work tends to be more transactional in nature. It often feels more urgent as well. And herein lies the problem. If the same product expert who answers demanding administrative questions and labors to fill out complicated compliance paperwork is also responsible for helping to craft unique, integrated solutions for clients, the whole client experience—the competitive work—could easily fall apart. Prying apart these two different types of activities so different teams can perform them ensures that vital competitive work is not engulfed by less competitive tasks.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The executives lasered in on the key work that they believed would create growth, and then they pinpointed other work where they could tighten efficiencies and perhaps even decrease their performance to par without impacting customers. That’s right: they pegged the areas of the organization that could be average. That is where they planned to cut costs by eliminating or streamlining workflows and reducing head count.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Engage the leadership of the organization in the macro design process. In the end, they will be the ones to implement the new organization and adjust to the trade-offs. • Engage those who do the work of the organization in the micro design process. In the end, they will be the ones who must do the work differently from before.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Organization alignment efforts are not complete until micro alignment choices are put into action.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“While macro alignment defines and enables new capabilities, micro alignment creates and aligns the DNA-level processes, structures, and practices that produce those capabilities. Micro-level efforts are the ones that actually change what an organization does. They re-sequence the genetic coding of the organization. Thus, micro design includes the hard work of making choices that also drive culture change.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“The second-effort pulse of organization alignment work—to move down the road in the new direction—involves organizing choices that are more detailed, more process-oriented, and that involve managers and contributors who actually perform the work that needs to change. The scope narrows to individual functions, processes, departments, and teams. It is often led by third- and fourth-level leaders in their new seats but can be carried out at any level. Because the focus is tighter, we call this micro alignment. Because it is in this pulse that the day-to-day work routines, jobs, decision-making realities, information tools, reward systems, and other policies really take on new forms, another term that describes this level of alignment is operational alignment. Micro design is absolutely the real work of mid-level leaders because it is essentially innovative and operational in nature.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“Macro alignment, or business model alignment, is the province of the organization’s highest-level leaders. This work is very much about identifying and evaluating strategic capabilities—including what processes will have the greatest competitive impact and how best to group people to generate the most intense competitive focus. Far from being a distraction to weightier concerns, macro design is absolutely the real work of executives because it is essentially innovative and strategic in nature. Macro alignment often, but not always, involves structural change to the top three or four levels of the organization.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works

“He and Cook outsourced everything not essential to the customer experience. They streamlined the supply chain, enforcing a new discipline on suppliers, reducing inventory, and closing warehouses. Two months of inventory was sitting in warehouses when Jobs returned to Apple. Within eighteen months, he and Cook had reduced it to two days' worth.”
― Reed Deshler, Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works