You’ve made it. You’re finally at the helm of this company or this Business Unit. Your new appointment crowns many years of hard work, and a bit of luck. You’ve read HBR articles in detail and a swarm of your favorite consultants are sending you congratulations notes.

1. The Hay Group Singapore: The CEO
and the new BMW
You’ve made it. You’re finally at the helm of this company or this Business Unit.
Your new appointment crowns many years of hard work, and a bit of luck.
You’ve read HBR articles in detail and a swarm of your favorite consultants are
sending you congratulations notes.
In many ways, the situation is comparable to when you got delivery of your
brand new BMW. It’s always a bit intimidating getting into a new car. The smell
of leather and glue is nicely intoxicating but you worry about the controls. It
would be silly to stall, or worse crash, as you take your first turn outside the
dealership.
You know how to drive. You got your license eons ago, much like your forgotten
MBA or engineering degree. You’ve driven thousands of miles on all types of
roads and under many weather conditions. You have experience behind the
wheel of many cars, from your rusty Honda at school to the convertible you
bought when you cashed your first stock options.
It mirrors your career. You have been staff and line. You have headed three
different countries. You’ve led teams in sales, marketing, IT and are considered
an expert of the supply-chain. You have even restructured a couple of
operations. Nothing fazes you.
The BMW sales guy shows you how the car controls work. Your short stint as the
IT director in Canada becomes finally useful when he covers all the
customization options, from gear-changing to suspension settings, from
differentiated cabin climate to Bluetooth. Eventually you drive safely to your first
board meeting which goes well.
You then organize a road trip with some cultural or sports alibi when in fact the
plan is to see how your car really drives on that small winding road you so like.

2. And as you discover the true performance envelope of your car, your grin grows.
You understand how it corners, how you can accelerate and maintain traction,
what its handling limits are. In essence you internalize the actual performance
potential of your new car.
As your start your new job on Monday, your board reminds you that you are
expected to deliver a deep corporate transformation leading to sustainably higher
ROCE. Your strategy consultants tell you about the criticality of your first
hundred days (make or break) and how they have a blueprint or a roadmap for
you. Your CFO takes you through the details of your balance sheet and your cash
position and she shows you a first draft of your communication to the analysts
community. You are subjected to scores of presentations covering your market
positions by geographies and business lines, your global manufacturing position,
your patents and pending litigations. You are being shown the management
systems at your disposal to run the company. But you get almost no information
about your workforce. You don’t know its skills and how they will evolve. You
have no visibility on its resilience. You have limited data on the turnover of the
critical roles. You’re left to resort to your intuition.
In other words, you now know everything there is to know about the technical
specifications of your company, but you don’t know how it will drive. This is why
a Workforce Legacy analysis, which I will cover in my next blog, is as important
as you Strategic Roadmap. Going somewhere with a car you don’t understand
often won’t get you anywhere.