Paul's Update 7/28

Op-Ed: Courage: The Defining Characteristic of Great Leaders

Op-Ed: Courage: The Defining Characteristic of Great Leaders Courageous leaders inspire employees, energize customers, and position their companies on the front lines of soc...

Courageous leaders inspire employees, energize customers, and position their companies on the front lines of societal change. Bill George explains why there aren't more of them.

Courage is the quality that distinguishes great leaders from excellent managers. Courageous leaders take risks that go against the grain of their organizations. They make decisions with the potential for revolutionary change in their markets. Their boldness inspires their teams, energizes customers, and positions their companies as leaders in societal change.

Courageous leaders lead with principles–their True North–that guide them when pressure mounts. They don’t shirk bold actions because they fear failure. They don’t need external adulation, nor do they shrink from facing criticism. It takes bold decisions to build great global companies. If businesses are managed without courageous leadership, then R&D programs, product pipelines, investments in emerging markets, and employees’ commitment to the company’s mission all wither.

Let’s look at some recent examples of courageous leaders whose actions transformed their companies: 

• Alan Mulally When Mulally arrived at Ford, he found a depleted organization losing $18 billion that year and unwilling to address its fundamental issues. To retool Ford’s entire product line and automate its factories, Mulally borrowed $23.5 billion, convincing the Ford family to pledge its stock and the famous Ford Blue Oval as collateral. His bold move paid off.
• Mary Barra, GM’s CEO since 2014, testified before a hostile Senate investigating committee about deaths from failed ignition switches on Chevrolet Camaros. Rather than make excuses, Barra took responsibility for the problems and went further to attribute them to “GM’s cultural problems.” Three years later, she is well on her way to transforming GM’s moribund, finance-driven culture into a dynamic, accountable organization focused on building quality vehicles worldwide.
• Paul Polman When Polman became Unilever’s CEO in early 2009, he immediately began transforming the company, declaring bold goals to double revenues and generate 70 percent from emerging markets. He aligned 175,000 employees around sustainability, publishing the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan with well-defined metrics the following year. 
• Indra Nooyi: Named CEO of PepsiCo in 2006, Nooyi foresaw the coming shift among consumers, especially the millennial generation, to healthier foods and beverages. She immediately introduced PepsiCo’s strategy “Performance with Purpose,” that focuses on complementing the company’s core soft drink and snack business with healthy foods and beverages.

There are literally thousands of competent managers who can run organizations efficiently using pre-determined operating plans, but few with the courage to transform entire enterprises. 

The courage cohort includes Delta’s Richard Anderson, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy and Ursula Burns, Nestle’s Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Novartis’ Dan Vasella, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Merck’s Ken Frazier, and Alibaba’s Jack Ma. They join the growing list of authentic leaders that have made courageous decisions to build great global companies.

To quote poet Maya Angelou, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”

Relating to the New Innovation Era – Innovation Excellence

Relating to the New Innovation Era – Innovation Excellence The Innovation Excellence community is home to innovation articles, webinars, videos, training and education - p...

I firmly believe we are on the cusp of a new innovation era. When you step back and recognize all the different advancements we have been making in designing tools and frameworks, in understanding innovation, it holds promise. There are a number of intersections and driving forces that are coming together and what is emerging is this new innovation era. Now we have to weave them together. Much of what we have will still remain. We are still in need of finding innovations that provide new products, services or business models. These outcomes remain constant, it is the way we approach these that is in need of being seen as dramatically different. 

Innovation is hard work yet we seem to make it harder because we “freeze” our understanding of it.

We hang on to all the legacies built up around the existing innovation system, we manage innovation in efficient and expected ways, yet is is often clearly not predictable, it often remains uncertain even when it arrives in the market place to be judged by the consumer. What we design in organizations is far too rigid and not highly adaptive and that is not reflecting the speed of response we need in facing up to more volatile markets today.

We need to keep checking back on what we do in our innovation activities to find the ‘sweet spot’ of customer needs and why, where and what they see value in and then how ‘we’ can design and respond to this evolving need. We need to be highly adaptive. We need a change, we are facing such constantly changing environments and challenges. We need to recognize the future is going to be totally different from the past. 

Becoming adaptive in organizations that are often highly rigid and standardized is so conflicting, so different, you must separate the two that many are arguing even stronger today than ever require a dual innovation process or organization design. 

I keep in constant need to “sharpen the translation points of innovation“. I’ve reflected on this and have determined five broad themes of innovation that radically alters the way we design our innovation processes and where I have a place to play and advise upon. These are:

• Exploring innovation and pattern recognition through more facilitated conversations and investigation designing pathways, roadmaps, blueprints. These are more expeditions of discovery with a shared intent to alter the thinking and understanding around innovation. 
• Structuring for Asset Orchestration. This is built on the intent that you must orchestrate the capabilities constantly, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the final result and then rebuild them specifically for the next requirement or solution need. For me to manage and orchestrate means to lead, to frame, conduct and set the tempo but it is constantly changing and for that we need to be far more adaptive and fluid in our asset deployments.
• Aligning People, Technology, and Innovation in Design. While experimentation speeds the time to a viable business innovation, it does not necessarily lead immediately to the kind of large-scale growth or increased market share that are usually the barometers of performance in the core business. It is the “combination effect” of building this alignment between people, technology that is evolving at increasing speed and complexity and innovation, in the way it responds and achieves the engagement
• Impact and Intensity becomes the new mantra. We need to be more agile, iterative, to be encouraged to be experimenting and exploring. Our world is shifting from scalable efficiency to scalable learning.  It is the degrees of adoption, the investments made, the multiple levels of activities and the focus of the intensity given to building capabilities to innovate will yield the eventual impact. Execution and Value Delivery needs to drive the whole innovation process.
• Exploring and Aligning. Here I am pushing for a new management model where we are pushing to seek increasing ‘fusion’ but still want degree’s of separation, we are seeking out ‘flows’ through new knowledge to break down barriers that restrict new insights so as to turn these into new value creation, and we are encouraged to seek out and establish a higher ‘fluidity’ in what we do and reduce the rigidity we presently have in place in our current organizations.We need to operate in ‘dual minds’ and structures is at last constantly striving for the innovation balance: between exploring and exploiting.

Nothing is standing still anymore, it is evolving constantly and we equally need to design our innovation to adapt to this new innovation era. 

7 Digital Trends That Will Change Business Forever

7 Digital Trends That Will Change Business Forever The outlook for the second half of 2017 reflects the “new digital-led normal,” as businesses continue to adapt t...

The outlook for the second half of 2017 reflects the “new digital-led normal,” as businesses continue to adapt technologies to compete on an increasingly crucial user experience. What more can we expect? Read on for seven sizzling digital trends to follow for the second half of 2017.

• Battling Bad Bots - After years of increased awareness about ad fraud, the industry appeared to see signs of progress in early 2017. The latest ANA and White Ops baseline study estimated a 10% reduction in losses due to bot fraud in late 2017 and said media agencies had improved controls on programmatic buys. That’s all very promising, but don’t expect the industry to claim victory and lower its guard. Experts are quick to point out that bad actors test and learn.
• Focus On Image Recognition - If 2017 is the year when voice-recognition goes mainstream with Alexa and Siri running the connected home, it’s also the start of a new trend to leverage the mobile phone’s camera and combine image recognition with all kinds of artificial intelligence.
• Now You See It … - ... Now you don’t. In expectation of the release of Google Lens, many platforms are experimenting with augmented reality applications. AR is still not quite ready for prime time, but many groups are testing it and getting ready to go.
• VR Now Just One Of The Gang - After the initial rush, reality has set in—on virtual reality. At the 2017 NewFronts, virtual reality was presented as just one more tool in the toolbox; a VR capability was table stakes but not the top priority for content development. Rather, VR’s focus has shifted to the delicacies of creating content and where it is appropriate, with less focus on the novelty of showing off the technology. 
• Pour Some Content On Me - In 2017, cooperation and joint ventures between players—even competing ones—is the way to go. Many platforms stress that the demands of producing quality content for multiple channels and adopting multiple technologies are often more than one company can handle.  
• It’s (A)Live! - Live-streaming content is all the rage. Nearly every platform presenting at NewFronts launched or expanded live video content via the various social media platforms, such as Facebook Live and Twitter feeds, or on their own.
• Personalization Gets Emotional - Between the drumbeat of resistance to the new administration in the U.S., the anti-Brexit backlash in the latest British election, and the results of the French election, the polarization of Western society seems to have no end in sight. In this fractious environment, personalization isn’t just about demographics or even context anymore, experts said. It’s about appealing to belief. These days, new technologies enable AI to judge the flavor of content online based on its emotional appeal and tone, opening the door to targeting based on attitudes and emotion. 

Paul's Update Special 7/21

A growing number of people think their job is useless. Time to rethink the meaning of work

A growing number of people think their job is useless. Time to rethink t... The value of your work should not be determined by your paycheck, but by the amount of happiness you spread and ...

A great deal has been written in recent years about the perils of automation. In a study that has already racked up several hundred citations, scholars at Oxford University have estimated that no less than 47% of all American jobs and 54% of those in Europe are at a high risk of being usurped by machines. And not in a hundred years or so, but in the next 20. In response, the real question we should be asking ourselves is: what actually constitutes “work” in this day and age?

In a 2013 survey of 12,000 professionals by the Harvard Business Review, half said they felt their job had no “meaning and significance,” and an equal number were unable to relate to their company’s mission, while another poll among 230,000 employees in 142 countries showed that only 13% of workers actually like their job.

They have, what anthropologist David Graeber refers to as, “bullshit jobs”. On paper, these jobs sound fantastic. And yet there are scores of successful professionals with imposing LinkedIn profiles and impressive salaries who nevertheless go home every evening grumbling that their work serves no purpose. So, will there still be enough jobs for everyone a few decades from now? Anybody who fears mass unemployment underestimates capitalism’s extraordinary ability to generate new bullshit jobs. If we want to really reap the rewards of the huge technological advances made in recent decades (and of the advancing robots), then we need to radically rethink our definition of “work.”

It starts with an age-old question: what is the meaning of life? Most people would say the meaning of life is to make the world a little more beautiful, or nicer, or more interesting. But how? These days, our main answer to that is: through work. Our definition of work, however, is incredibly narrow. Only the work that generates money is allowed to count toward GDP. Our whole system of finding meaning could dissolve like a puff of smoke.

The time has come to stop sidestepping the debate and home in on the real issue: what would our economy look like if we were to radically redefine the meaning of “work”? I firmly believe that a universal basic income is the most effective answer to the dilemma of advancing robotization. Because a basic income would give everybody the chance to do work that is meaningful.

I believe in a future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck, but by the amount of happiness you spread and the amount of meaning you give. I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job, but for a life well lived. I believe in a future where “jobs are for robots and life is for people.”

And if basic income sounds Utopian to you, then I’d like to remind you that every milestone of civilization – from the end of slavery to democracy to equal rights for men and women – was once a Utopian fantasy too. Or, as Oscar Wilde wrote long ago: “Progress is the realization of Utopias.”

(This article has been translated from Dutch by Elizabeth Manton.)

Four Strategies for Cultivating Strong Leaders Internally

Four Strategies for Cultivating Strong Leaders Internally A retired brigadier general explains how companies can prioritize talent development.

Strong leadership is a hallmark of strong companies. But it is often a resource in very short supply. This means that cultivating leaders internally, while challenging, has a lot of advantages. 

Bernard Banks, a clinical professor of management and associate dean for leadership development at the Kellogg School, would know, having spent more than 25 years in the U.S. Army before retiring in 2016 as a Brigadier General. In his role leading the Department of Behavioral Sciences & Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Banks found value in maximizing the leadership potential in every cadet, as well as in members of the Academy’s staff and faculty. 

But in the business world, Banks has noticed a disconnect in how companies treat leadership development. “All effective leaders are effective leader developers,” Banks says. “The challenge becomes, are companies growing the leaders they need for today or the leaders they need for tomorrow?”  

Banks tells Kellogg Insight how companies can engage and develop their next generation of leaders. “All effective leaders are effective leader developers,” Banks says. “The challenge becomes, are companies growing the leaders they need for today or the leaders they need for tomorrow?”  Banks tells Kellogg Insight how companies can engage and develop their next generation of leaders. 

• Begin grooming future managers when they are still in non-management roles, so that they can develop prior to moving up the ladder.
• Bet on everyone. A firm might still pinpoint particular individuals to participate in a costly leadership course or formal training program. But others should not be left behind to stagnate or find their own way. Instead, the firm can make it a point to expose them to new on-the-job experiences, offer informal training sessions, and help foster new relationships that will encourage their development.  
• Create immersive experiences designed to make people better at thinking and responding.
• Keep employees in the driver’s seat. Companies stand to benefit from investing in talent development—but they also have to know when to back off. “We know that good development is self-directed,” says Banks. “Because, ultimately, you’re the one responsible for doing the work.”

Four Futures for Work in America – Shift

Four Futures for Work in America – Shift Anne-Marie Slaughter This was originally posted on LinkedIn for the Milken Institute Global Conference.

This was originally posted on LinkedIn for the Milken Institute Global Conference. It is based on the soon-to-be-released findings of Shift: The Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology, a joint project of New America and Bloomberg to understand the future of work.

Shift Convened by Bloomberg and New America.

We asked our Shift commissioners — a lively mix of leaders from multiple sectors, bringing together labor, civic, religious, academic, entrepreneurial, and more traditional business perspectives — two basic questions. (1) Will there be more or less work in the future? (2) Will work continue to be in its traditional form, full-time jobs, or separate into more “task” work (like short-term contracts, part-time gigs, or other alternative arrangements)?

Their answers to these questions generated 44 colorful and concrete work futures, some positive and some negative. We distilled the common themes from these visions into four basic scenarios, which we are releasing today at the Milken Institute Global Conference.

In two of these scenarios, we will continue to work mostly in jobs, one where there’s less work available in total (what we called the King of the Castle Economy, a winner-take-all game) and one where there’s more work available (the Go Economy, where you can keep building as long as you want).

You can find our detailed write-up of the scenarios here.

Elements of each of these scenarios are happening today. Almost all of them spell considerable uncertainty for almost all workers in comparison with the stability of widely available Industrial Age 9-to-5 jobs. 

The goal of the Shift Commission is to move the public conversation about the future of work forward. We encourage participants in that conversation to grapple with more realistic and varied visions of multiple possible futures. We also urge leaders and citizens to start thinking and acting now to create the public and private responses we need to ensure that the Digital Economy will work for everyone.

Paul's Update Special 7/14

Want Your Employees to Trust You? Show You Trust Them

Want Your Employees to Trust You? Show You Trust Them Here’s how to do it.

Executives and managers invest a lot of effort and time building trust in their teams: both establishing trust in their employees and ensuring that their employees trust them in return. But many employees say they do not feel trusted by their managers. And when employees don’t feel trusted, workplace productivity and engagement often suffer. It’s up to managers to signal trust in their employees in consistent and thoughtful ways.

There are at least three reasons why leaders and organizations don’t demonstrate their trust in employees:

• Managers often lack the self-awareness required to realize that their own actions may communicate a lack of trust. 
• Organizations often design their structure, policies, and culture in order to minimize risk and optimize efficiency. But organizations that are risk averse may also signal that employees cannot be trusted with resources and information. 
• Pressure to reach performance targets and control costs sometimes leads managers to do things that unintentionally signal a lack of trust. 

Despite these common obstacles, there are several ways managers can signal trust in an employee:

• First, don’t assume that your employees have high trust in you. Learn to read their trust levels by understanding the risks and vulnerabilities they face. Take an inventory of the practices, policies, and controls found in your organization: Are they risk-tolerant? Take an assessment of your own conduct, too.
• The onus to grow mutual trust is on the manager. That means not only cultivating employees’ trust, but conveying prudent, incremental trust in them. 
• Another important way leaders take risks is communicating openly and honestly with employees. Being transparent signals that you trust your employees with the truth, even in difficult circumstances.
• Pushing for needed change. Earlier, we mentioned a company whose innovation was constrained by a risk averse culture; one they knew they needed to change. By expanding this authority, the company conveyed trust in employees across ranks. 
• Finally, letting employees know you are willing to invest in their potential and advocate for them conveys confidence and trust. Get to know their career aspirations, then help them reach their goals.

Managers may be unaware of the unintended signals they send regarding how much they trust their employees. To build an environment of sustained mutual trust, learn to read the trust landscape and take care to clearly signal trust and confidence in employees.

What Happened When Microsoft Gave Employees $50,000 to Experiment With Innovation

What Happened When Microsoft Gave Employees $50,000 to Experiment With I... Focusing on experimentation and learning empowers people to innovate and businesses to build growth capabilities...

As the pace of change has accelerated in the ever faster-changing tech industry, Silicon Valley's most innovative companies have used a variety of methods to foster innovation and grow fast.

When tech behemoth Microsoft found that it needed to learn fast and act even faster, CMO Asia-Pacific Justin Spelhaug found a way to get teams innovating and quickly building growth capabilities in sales and marketing. He used a data-driven, "test-measure-iterate then build" method.

Spelhaug gave five teams $10,000 each and 45 days to develop and test an innovative marketing idea. It could be anything as long as it had a high return on learning (ROL).

Spelhaug's experimental approach allowed the marketing team to try out and test several approaches quickly. By formally stating hypotheses, setting up a study design, and gathering data to evaluate the outcomes, the teams were able to learn quickly and at the same time, they ultimately delivered a valuable marketing campaign.

When growing a business, there are times when you need to go faster and grow capabilities to meet evolving customer needs or stay ahead of the competition. By experimenting, thinking big, and measuring return on learning rather than return on investment, like Microsoft did, you can quickly develop growth capabilities where you need them.

Working Longer: It Can Keep Your Brain Sharp

Working Longer: It Can Keep Your Brain Sharp Research shows cognitive benefits for delaying retirement, with two caveats

To the question “Does working past the traditional retirement age keep you mentally sharp?” the answer was a qualified “yes” among several scholars attending the recent 2017 Age Boom Academy at Columbia University in early June. (I’ll get to the caveats later.)

Work may even help stave off dementia. A large study of nearly half a million self-employed workers in France suggests that delaying retirement means people may be at less risk of developing dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.

What is it about work that keeps the brain nimble?

Work often gives people a sense of purpose in life, a boon to well-being and mental health. The workplace is a social environment, a community with colleagues and coworkers. You must communicate with people to do your job, while still finding time for gossip, the lifeblood of any organization. You have tasks to accomplish and, much of the time, even routine jobs require learning new software programs, shifts in schedules and meeting new hires.

Science these days is moving away from the bleak image of aging as an inevitable process of brain damage and decline. Researchers have discovered that an aging brain compensates for declines in some capabilities with improvements in others.

Okay, what about the caveats?

One qualification about working longer being good for the brain is that the research doesn’t show cause and effect. It isn’t easy disentangling whether people with better cognition are migrating into more complex jobs or whether those activities protect cognition. That said, scholars have found that even workers with routine jobs can enjoy mental returns on the job if their employer introduces variety and training to what they do.

Bringing “novelty” into the job (learning new skills and tasks) was associated with improved mental processing speed and working memory.

So let’s focus on building all kinds of work options for older employees, from semi-retirement programs to flexible and part-time work schedules. And employers: train those workers to keep their skills current and to keep the employees engaged with their jobs. That’s a smart way to rev up the brain’s performance among older individuals and raise the cognitive capacities of the nation.

Paul's Update Special 7/7

Leadership and the curiosity quotient

Leadership and the curiosity quotient Curiosity is one of the most vital - but least acknowledged - of leadership values. It is the catalyst for creat...

Why do leaders and their teams still struggle? In last month’s Harvard Business Review, Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull put this failure down to a consistent breakdown in leaders’ ability to execute their business strategies ( Why Strategy Execution Unravels - and what to do about it). And while that is often true, I believe the authors overlooked a more fundamental issue that plagues almost every organization.

Leaders lack curiosity.

In particular, they lack:

• The curiosity to become better leaders
• The curiosity to learn what good looks like and to share best practices with others
• The curiosity to develop or learn why team members struggle with new skills
• And vitally, they lack curiosity about their own and their customers’ businesses.

Simply defined, curiosity is, “the desire to learn or know more about something or someone.” It is the starting point to every great idea, invention and new business. It is what makes some businesses wildly successful while others are just average and it’s the real reason why some leaders and their teams succeed, while others fail.

As Jeff Bezos put it, “You have to say, ‘Wait a second. Why are we doing it this way? Could it be better? Could it be different?’ That kind of curiosity, that explorer’s mind, that childlike wonder, that’s what makes an inventor.”

Thriving in a complex and volatile business environment requires leaders who approach every day, every problem and every opportunity with an inquisitive spirit. It’s this curiosity that drives leaders to learn their companies inside and out and to never stop looking for ideas to improve.

Business Curiosity is the skill of looking at your (or your customer’s) business differently and uncovering ideas and opportunities that disrupt the thinking, processes and practices which your company (or your customer) has grown accustomed to. Business Curiosity starts with deep listen listening, and it requires continuously asking “why?” without being satisfied by superficial answers. Answers don’t change the world; questions do.

In coaching workshops I have asked over 300 business leaders to measure the time they spend working with direct reports. The results are both eye-opening and troubling. Assuming 240 workdays per year, most only spend between 30 and 60 days per year directly engaging with team members - that’s less than 20% of their time. 

Breaking this inward focus requires alignment at all levels. First, leaders (and their bosses) need to prioritize time differently, focusing on customers (their people and end users). And they need to block time to do this, regardless of what’s going on around them in their own organization.

Next, leaders must take a curious interest in the skills and goals of their team members and they must be willing to have tough conversations to really understand what is limiting personal performance and getting in the way of their success. A leader who purposely spends 60-80% of their time traveling and engaging with their team for three months will be amazed what they will learn both about their team and about themselves.

By clearing the biggest obstacle to progress - YOU - leaders give themselves permission to learn more and engage differently with both team members and customers. They actually give themselves a chance to become more curious.

Developing a high Curiosity Quotient takes time and practice, particularly because it far more about changing your behavior rather than learning a new skill. Here are four ways to get started:

• Be a Curious Learner: Spend at least an hour per week learning about business, the markets you serve, and your customers’ businesses.
• Become More Curious: Ask better questions in every conversation whether at work or outside of work. Listen for how you respond to conversations and hold your urge to respond with your own story.
• Disrupt the Status Quo: With your team and with other leaders, discuss what status quos are holding back your company and your customer’s business, preventing you both from reaching your full potential today.
• Dig Deeper: Try to understand the underlying beliefs, experiences and assumptions that are underneath current business processes and practices. Dig for the “Why” and understand why you (and they) do business the way you do business today.

As Albert Einstein said: “I am neither especially clever nor especially gifted…I am only very, very curious”.

6 Ways Leaders Use Silence To Increase Their Power (And You Can, Too)

6 Ways Leaders Use Silence To Increase Their Power (And You Can, Too) Avery Blank Silence is powerful, if you know how to use it properly.

Sometimes, words are not all they are cracked up to be. Silence can yield more power than words. Inventor and artist Leonardo da Vinci said, “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”

Here are six times when leaders use silence to increase their power that can grow your power:

• Build trust. If you want to develop effective relationships, you must build trust. To build trust, you must listen.
• Emphasize a point. If you use too many words, the point you want to make can get lost. Silence or fewer words allows you to be heard when it matters.
• Negotiate. Silence when negotiating can be nerve-wracking. When the other person is silent, you wonder what they might be thinking. Turn the tables. Let them wonder what you are thinking.
• Empower others. Leaders empower others. They rarely tell people what to do. Rather, leaders provide others the opportunity to identify the roadmap for achieving the goals they set out to achieve. Leaders want to know what other people think.
• Get the answer. The sooner you become silent, the quicker you will get your answer. Many people are guilty of asking a question and not stopping at the question mark. Ask the question, and stop.
• Center yourself. You don’t need other people to reap the power of silence. Take time out of your day to be silent.

There are times when silence can speak louder than words. Know when silence will help you more effectively speak up for yourself, lead and increase your power.

The Pyramid Principle – Lessons from McKinsey – Medium

The Pyramid Principle – Lessons from McKinsey – Medium Ameet Ranadive At McKinsey, one of the lessons I learned was the importance of structured thinking and communication. We often ...

One of the tools that we used at McKinsey was the Pyramid Principle, a methodology for structured communication. The key take-aways from the Pyramid Principle at McKinsey were:

1. Start with the answer first.
2. Group and summarize your supporting arguments.
3. Logically order your supporting ideas.

Start with the answer first.
To communicate in a structured way with a busy executive, you should start with the answer to the executive’s question first, and then list your supporting arguments. Only then, after you have answered the question, should you present your supporting reasons. Why?

1. First, you want to maximize your time with your audience. Executives are busy people. They are perpetually short on time, are used to processing lots of information quickly, and get impatient when they feel like someone isn’t getting to the point. 
2. Second, many executives often think in a “top-down” manner. They want to focus on the big picture—in this case the “answer”— and don’t want to get bogged down by details.
3. Finally, you are more persuasive when you are direct.

Group and summarize your supporting arguments.
Your audience—whether listeners or readers—will naturally begin to group and summarize your arguments and ideas in order to remember them. So you may as well help them do it and make your overall recommendation more effective and memorable. The Pyramid Principle advocates that “ideas in writing should always form a pyramid under a single thought.” The single thought is the answer to the executive’s question. Underneath the single thought, you are supposed to group and summarize the next level of supporting ideas and arguments. 

Logically order your supporting ideas.
Finally, you want to ensure that the ideas you bring together under each group actually belong together, are at the same level of importance, and follow some logical structure. There are a few different ways of logically ordering ideas that belong in the same group:

• Time order: if there is a sequence of events that form a cause-effect relationship, you should present the ideas in time order.
• Structural order: break a singular thought into its parts, ensuring that you have covered all of the major supporting ideas.
• Degree order: present supporting ideas in rank order of importance, most to least important.

The Pyramid Principle is not just valuable for communicating with executives, but really it’s effective to communicate with anyone whom you wish to persuade with argument.