If you are the CEO of a large, established company, you should be able to enjoy the benefits of size, including the ability to learn from a broad, long-standing customer base. With more customers to seek feedback from, your firm should be able to detect changes in the market faster than smaller competitors. And with size comes the resources to deliver what the market wants.
But that may not feel like your reality. Too often, large size becomes a hindrance. Insurgents swarm and thrive by targeting customers that your company consistently underserves. Meanwhile, inside your offices, internal issues constantly steal attention from customers’ needs. Your senior executives spend more time negotiating among departments and internal functions. Innovation gets handled centrally, far from the front line. Customers are neither involved in the process nor, in some cases, even welcome.
As CEO, you can fight back by sponsoring microbattles — discrete, narrowly defined, customer-focused initiatives pursued by small cross-functional teams. Microbattles force everyone to behave like insurgents, focusing only on what’s essential to meet a narrow goal. Microbattles aim to increase sales, deplete a specific competitor’s sales, and put learning how to innovate back to the center of the company’s activities and executive attention. Waging microbattles helps a company do several important things:
— RESTORE THE VOICES OF CUSTOMERS: As decision-making switches to microbattles, the voices of customers dealing with the company’s front line grow louder in executive meetings.
— MOVE AND INNOVATE FASTER: Microbattles increase the cadence of the entire organization by tuning to the pace of the market instead of calendar-based budgeting or planning cycles. I’ve seen successful companies break down microbattles into 30-day sprints. Executive meetings focus on reviewing the dozens of battles in progress, with each reporting every 30 days on the missions accomplished or destroyed.
— IMPROVE SPECIFIC, NOT GENERAL, ABILITIES: Too often, senior executive teams favor horizontal, internally focused actions like “building a world-class finance function.” Microbattles reorient the organization to vertical initiatives, such as increasing sales of a specific product in a specific region or channel.
As CEO, your role is to maintain systems that take the lessons from each microbattle’s successes and failures and disseminate the ideas companywide.
Committing to 25 microbattles over the next six months is very different from debating the mathematical allocation of targets across the entire business. And that’s the point. Choosing the microbattles to pursue involves discussions about how your company would win each one and how you would organize to sell.
Ultimately, microbattles restore your company’s ability to learn and then actually get stuff done. Growth comes not from targets set on high but from lessons learned directly from customers and the front line.
