Julia Dhar

I think the number one thing, and this is, of course, much easier to see if you're inside a company, if you're spending a lot of time with the leadership team, but I think you can discern it from the outside as well, is change.

Does the leadership team, the CEO and the board, are they expressing true agreement on what the future direction of the company is?

Or do we have a false alignment?

And so let me give you a really small illustration of this in our own life.

Have you ever been in a meeting and where towards the end of the meeting, someone very senior says,

well, okay, are we all aligned?

And there's sort of a longish pause.

It seems pretty clear that the only answer is to say yes, even though there's clearly an undercurrent of many questions left.

That's false alignment.

where we might even have a rough view of the direction, but it is not at all apparent that people inside the room have said, I know why we need to change.

What are the economic and more competitive forces requiring us to change?

I know what exactly we are going to do.

Beyond, for example, saying we will have an AI transformation, that's not a very good example of being specific about what type of change we have.

And equally importantly, how we are going to change.

What exactly people who work here in this company, the suppliers who serve us, the customers that we reach, how we expect their behavior to change.

And so you can test that fairly well inside a company just by asking people what they think has been agreed to and checking if that is the same thing.

I think you can also discern it from the outside.

How clear is the strategy when different members of the leadership team speak about their strategy and intentions?

Do they speak about them in approximately the same way?

Do they use the same choices of words?