Leadership Transitions: The Watkins Collection (4 Items)

152 Your Next Move

priorities: Given the overall revenue goal, what should the contri-

bution of each product be? Given the overall cost-reduction goal,

which areas should we target for cutting? And so on.

Finally, the scorecards and dashboards can also help generate

explicit discussions about any fundamental trade-offs that need to

be made in the business—for instance, “If we do X, we’ll have to

do Y, and we should acknowledge that up front.” These discus-

sions should obviously be informed by and consistent with the

decisions the team made about the business model: what the cus-

tomer value proposition is and which core capabilities the com-

pany needs to excel in. These conversations should also be baked

into the organization’s operating goals, as ...