S6 E10 - Evan Campbell – Adapting to Win: Turning Strategy into Action

I have a fascinating conversation with Evan Campbell in this episode. Evan brings an unusually broad perspective to organizational transformation, drawing on a career that spans the U.S. Army Special Forces, telecommunications, software development, entrepreneurship, Lean consulting, and executive leadership. He is also the author of Adapt to Win, a book focused on helping organizations turn strategy into execution while developing the adaptability required to compete in a rapidly changing world.

Our conversation begins with a deceptively simple question: Why are so many organizations bad at executing their strategies? Companies spend millions developing sophisticated strategies, yet those strategies frequently fail to translate into meaningful changes in how work gets done. Evan argues that the problem often isn't the strategy itself; it's strategy deployment. By the time strategic intent travels from executives through layers of management to the people actually doing the work, the signal has often become distorted, fragmented, or lost entirely.

Evan also offers a useful test for whether an organization really has a strategy: Where do we play, and how do we win? If leaders across the organization provide dramatically different answers, or if the strategy consists entirely of statements nobody could reasonably disagree with, then the apparent alignment may be little more than superficial consensus. Real strategy requires choices, and choices necessarily mean deciding what the organization will not do.

We explore this through Evan's experiences inside large organizations, including an IT organization overwhelmed by more work than it could effectively process. Rather than confront excessive work in process and unstable delivery, leadership wanted to repair relationships with dissatisfied stakeholders. Evan uses the example to illustrate a recurring transformation failure: organizations often want consultants to address the symptoms of a broken system without changing the system producing those symptoms.

The conversation eventually turns toward AI and the latest wave of digital transformation. We see many of the same patterns that appeared during outsourcing, Agile, DevOps, and previous transformation movements. Organizations can easily mistake adopting a technology or creating a new department for actually transforming how they operate. AI may dramatically reduce the effort required to produce software, but that doesn't eliminate constraints. Understanding requirements, architecture, validation, strategic prioritization, and determining whether we're building the right thing become even more important.

Ultimately, this episode is about much more than strategy frameworks, OKRs, Lean, or AI. It's about building organizations capable of learning and adapting. Technology will continue to change, constraints will move, and today's transformation will eventually be replaced by another. The organizations most likely to thrive will be those that can understand their systems, make deliberate strategic choices, learn from results, and continuously adapt how they invest their limited resources.

Show Notes:

• Evan's book, Adapt to Win: https://adapttowin.co/ Also available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other major retailers.
• Adaptivity Group (Evan's consulting firm):  https://www.adaptivitygroup.com/
• Evan's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AdapttoWin-Book

Transcript

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John Willis: [00:00:00] Hey, this is John Willis. Got another guest here for Profound, the Deming Profound. But, these days it's pretty much everything, anything that comes across the plate really. But I think this one gets us a little back closer to Deming and I think we're gonna have a lot of fun on this one.

Evan, you wanna go ahead and introduce yourself? 

Evan Campbell: Yeah, sure. 

John Willis: Hi, John. Tell, tell them everything, all right? 'Cause you got a fascinating background so give them- 

Evan Campbell: Okay. I'll try to keep it short. But yeah, I'm thrilled to be here, John, and nice to meet you I go all the way back to being an airborne ranger and a Green Beret in the Army.

Got into the very early days of cellular telephone as a direct line out of being the commo man on a Special Forces A Team. So I had all this training in radio wave propagation theory and antenna design. And then I realized that, probably standing on a cell tower 200 feet above the ground in a freezing, freezing rain that, those guys in IT had it a lot easier and- Oh, 

John Willis: yeah

Evan Campbell: They didn't seem to be that good at being on time or on budget. I thought I could [00:01:00] probably do a better job than them. Went to night school, learned Java programming. Turned out I was the worst software programmer ever. But pretty good at higher level abstraction architecture building and leading software development teams.

Led me to have a couple opportunities as an entrepreneur to be a CTO. Worked as a VP of software development and product development in a couple companies, several companies, two of which I PO'd a bunch of which didn't. And went back and forth throughout that time between consulting helping organizations transform their effectiveness using lean and lean product development in particular, and the Toyota production system and all of those practices.

Worked some in high tech manufacturing. And we eventually, me and some friends sold our consulting company to Accenture, the largest consulting company in the world. Stayed there for three years as a managing director till I got my earn-out check. And now I'm... I live on a ranch in the mountains in Southwest Colorado, [00:02:00] and I do a little consulting.

I rolled up everything I knew in a book recently that I released called Adapt to Win. And so now we're talking. 

John Willis: Yeah, no, similar. I love your thing about I always say that I think I ta- all the- I've had a couple of good successful exits, but boy, I've had some nasty burning crashes 

Evan Campbell: Yeah and some of those are bad timing, yeah. My, my, my first flaming pit in the ground was in the 2000 tech crash. 

John Willis: Oh, yeah. 

Evan Campbell: And then some of them were opportunities to learn from how we could have executed better. 

John Willis: Yeah. No, I, no, I agree. I, I tell some stories to the young kids. I not make this too much about me, but I, one...

In one scenario, I had to sell my house, move my family into my brother-in-law's basement because my business partner stole my business, and then the... I get the gasp. I'm like, no, man, that was like the... in, in retrospect, it was the greatest thing that ever happened. I had three exits, you know, over the next 25 years because of that

Evan Campbell: Yeah

but what's next- [00:03:00] It's amazing how things that you think are the end of the world- 

John Willis: Oh, yeah. Yeah. No yeah ... 

Evan Campbell: open wonderful opportunities- 

John Willis: Yeah, I think- ... that you 

Evan Campbell: wouldn't have had otherwise. 

John Willis: No, I think, you can relate to this. I try to tell my kids, they're just getting started in their careers, and I'm like, the "There are gonna be terrible days, and there are gonna be amazing days."

In startups, like that, that happens in one week, right? But- Yeah ... but then the, the question is how do you normalize taking the great insane days and get back to the mean? And then how do you take the really bad days, and how do you make sure that you're always getting back to that sort of normalcy?

Because that, when you stay too far in either direction, it messes you up. 

Evan Campbell: Yeah. It's Darwinian, man. Darwin said, the most successful species aren't the biggest and the meanest or whatever, they're the ones that are most resilient and adaptable. And it's the same thing with business strategy.

 It's like my book, Adapt to Win. It's like the, it's h- really hard for a lot of organizations to e- successfully realize a static strategy. The capabilities [00:04:00] required to be highly adaptable at a strategic level are even higher. But if you can pull it off, nobody can beat you.

John Willis: Yeah, I mean that's- And 

Evan Campbell: life's that way, too ... 

John Willis: that's the thing, right? I guess we could start with, like, why does so m- so many businesses just are terrible. And the only reason they... I wouldn't say the only reason, but they're they get away with a lot, right? The- there's some type of momentum in the market, like we see even for ourselves, but even at the macro level for the large, Fortune 1000, Fortune 500, they, most of them, I'm sure you've been, I've been in there, you've been in there, they're generally terrible at the principles that we know you have to be good at, but they still succeed.

Evan Campbell: Yeah it's amazing. And and they don't, not all of them always succeed. I- Yeah, no yeah. True ... we can talk at length- That's right. Yeah, true ... about some organizations that had awareness of the direction that they needed to move their strategy, and the way that the market and the, the product [00:05:00] environment was changing.

And they failed to be a- able to execute on that- 

John Willis: Yeah ... 

Evan Campbell: new vision. We can talk about everybody from Kodak to Xerox to BlackBerry- Yeah ... to, all the classic examples. But, I... the last 10 years or so, I've been really interested in strategy and what makes organizations able to implement strategies and be adaptable both on defense and on offense as disruptors with strategic adaptability.

And, the statistics are everywhere, and they're quoted all the time. 70% of co- corporations fail to implement their strategic objectives. 70% of corporation- 70% of corporate strategic initiatives fail. The reasons for these have a lot of commonality, but, I tell people at cocktail parties, "What do you..."

When they ask me what I do I do strategy consulting. Oh, you compete with McKinsey and BCG and all them." [00:06:00] And it's like, no not really. I follow them up. My typical conversation with a CEO or a chief strategy officer is like, "Evan, we, we had M- McBain CG in here a year and a half ago.

We spent $2 or $3 million. We've got this beautiful strategy. The board loves it. I've... and now I've got this deck of these gorgeous PowerPoints, but a year and a half later, we just did the employee engagement survey and only 10% of the employees know what the hell our goals are as a company or what we're trying to accomplish.

What are we doing wrong?" But that's the part that these, classic strategy consultancies, they don't stick around- ... to do the dirty, tough work of changing the client organization to the point where they can actually deploy and execute strategy successfully. Well- And that's where these failures come.

Yeah. Yeah. Not from bad strategies, but from not being able to make them reality.

John Willis: I think there's, two [00:07:00] things. One, for sure, again, I'm, we're both generalizing, but mostly based on... I think the numbers are accurate, right? The 70%, is that, a lot of these consultants, when I would try to sell to a CIO, I would make the argument that the reason, basically, they're not really gonna tell you the real bad stuff Because they wanna, what they wanna do is if they're coming in for a year, say, and which is way too long to figure out. If they come in for a year, then they wanna put people in there for five more years. 

And so that whole- that's their strategy.

Their strategy is to get, when you think about the total cost to them or their revenue, it's not the one year, it's the six years, right? And, and so they don't really wanna break the status quo. They don't want to, they, I, I think part of it is a broken system to start from, and my argument to a CIO would be, "I'm not gonna be here in after three months." 

I I, I'll [00:08:00] come back in a year from now But but I think the thing I see too on the strategy ver- similar to just, an executive either bringing in a large consulting company or literally just coming up with this, like what you're seeing now, and we'll hold off on the AI just for a little bit.

But the- Yeah ... the the, this AI strategies, they're just wish lists, right? And they don't really understand the organizational behavior. They don't understand the capacity, the, the, what they have. So they say- ... "Okay we're gonna basically... We have an AI strategy, and we're gonna do this, and we're gonna have this, and we're gonna...

Everybody's gonna get 30% productivity." And, and then, and they d- they haven't really even surveyed. They don't even understand their, I call it a talent system. But- 

Evan Campbell: Yeah. It makes me nuts. I- and IT is tough. Early in my career, I was in the agile lean digital transformation business, and, I'd spend a year or more with an [00:09:00] IT department in some traditional industry, like insurance or banking, and, you'd come to realize that all this talk was just political.

And, and not in every case, but in, in so many of them that, the, the appetite for change was it was all transformation theater. And nothing fundamentally was gonna sha- You spend a year of your life flying to New York or Hartford, Connecticut, God forbid, or wherever, and, a year later, you feel like you moved somebody's red Swingline stapler three inches across a desk, and that's the totality of your contribution.

And yeah, so we did all this. We spent I'm told tens of millions, hundreds of millions across the country in digital transformation with the idea that with the objective, the desired outcome of digital transformation being that the organization was adaptable, a- able to ingest new [00:10:00] technology innovations to drive technology innovation, to make technology and innovation and emerging technology all things that could confer strategic advantage to the business.

And here we have AI, and it's a completely different thing. So somehow it's not a new technology, it's not a new set of practices, it's not relevant to the digital transformation we supposedly accomplished a few years ago. We have to reinvent everything. It's a subclass, it's not it's just another case of new technology.

But the innovation programs aren't directed towards strate- they're not, there's no clarity about what these AI initiatives are supposed to accomplish. There's no definition of what good looks like or where the opportunities to impact the business are. So you get MIT's 95% failure rate, of 95% of the spend producing nothing of value at all.

John Willis: , Then, that begs [00:11:00] the question, and then I wanna hear about y- your successes, but, we, to keep it simple, Deming gave us an incredible blueprint. I think most, rational people who, they understand what Deming was trying to say.

And not just Deming, Goldratt, Ackoff, an army of management science- 

... 

John Willis: Out there that makes sense. But, I'll get pushback from people, not just anti-Deming people but pushback like I- I've got a relative in the military says, "Oh, we tried Deming in the military and, but it didn't work."

Or, or like, why is Deming now folklorish in, in business? Because, like every time I think about a story or something, I go back to, even as we, we get deeper into OKRs and talk about that I refresh my memory of what Deming would say about MBOs.

But, like, why we have all the... we know what good looks like, I think. I, but I- ... I rarely ever see good. 

Evan Campbell: Yeah. It's frustrating. I think one of the things, just as an [00:12:00] example of your point, when you have the existential pressure to achieve a level of competence, You find that organizations get there.

Let's contrast software development that's done in an IT department, a cost center that is rarely viewed by the CFO as particularly strategic. I don't know how many times I've heard a CFO say something like, we... I pour 4% of our revenue into this, and all I get back is gibberish and excuses.

Might as well offshore the whole thing." Versus software development in a product development organization where it's your P&L, and the entire business lives or dies by the ability of product management to define effective, impactful prioritization, and the delivery organization to be at least marginally competent and efficient in delivering software.

It- it's almost universally true that the pr- software product development organization [00:13:00] will be an order of magnitude better by almost any measure than the software development organization in an IT department. 

John Willis: And that... I love that because When I visit, I'd go in and d- what I would do is what I call qualitative analysis, where I would l- literally just spend...

And I, very similar to that I would usually be, unfortunately, after a big consulting company, 18 months, a year, like $15 million or whatever, and then it's not working, and some- like the chief of staff or the CIO will say, "You gotta talk to my buddy." And I come in and, I say, "Here's what I wanna do.

I wanna just interview all the people with their fingers on the keyboard. I wanna..." "I don't wanna talk to your leadership. I don't wanna and that's the difference. The consultants come in and talk all leadership. One of the things I'll find out really quick From the leadership, when I go back, is they do think that s- that IT is a cost center. Oh yeah. And I'm talking companies like, and I'm just use for example, but like for example, like a Starbucks, where they don't see themself as a software delivery kind.

 I can't imagine [00:14:00] anybody who doesn't believe they're not in the software delivery business today. 

Evan Campbell: Yeah. 

John Willis: And- 

Evan Campbell: I know, right? Techno- e- everything's technology-enabled and that even... And it was before AI, even more so now, 

John Willis: right? Yeah. No, yeah. I'm talking e- way before even AI or even now, forget about it.

But yeah, the, the fact that they don't even at the highest level... I told you my Delta story, right? That, like Delta is, I, I live in Atlanta, so I'm, a 3 million-miler. I d- you know, I fly Delta everywhere, right? And they are, I believe, as much as I know about aviation, and I'm a little bit of a geek on that, they, I think they're best of class at almost everything except IT.

Evan Campbell: Yeah. 

John Willis: They're generally terrible at IT. You don't have to be... You don't have to have been there internally to know that, right? You just gotta be- Yeah ... a customer. And- ... and and, but 

Evan Campbell: they- And what's a more technology-enabled business? How many times have we seen the, the whole transportation grid fall apart because the weight and balance system or the crew assignment system- Oh, 

John Willis: Yeah

Evan Campbell: crash [00:15:00] and, everybody 

John Willis: I mean, I, I'm a- 

Evan Campbell: Flights got canceled for 

John Willis: two days ... I'm a Marriott customer, too, and I'll s- I'll say the same thing. I think Marriott... And I, I don't know the internals. I've been, I've been to Marriott, but I'd, I'm not disclosing anything I learned there.

But I, yeah, as a customer, they're terrible at delivering service. Except the hotels the actual, hotel service and all is great, right? They treat me- Yeah ... like gold when I hit a hotel, but if I have to schedule something on their website, it just... it is...

And I 

Evan Campbell: get- Yeah, you change you change your reservation a couple of days and it turns the whole thing upside down and you're starting over. Yeah. 

John Willis: Yeah. I know. Yeah, but and, but I think you, you hit the nail right on the head is, but i- it's crazy that you would have a leadership.

I saw, So Mark Mark Schwartz wrote a book called A Seat at the Table, and what he said is his whole sort of premise is if your CIO doesn't have a seat at the table, then you're not really, I guess we could say that the... I would say that you're not gonna operate efficiently, like in your sort of description of an IT department.

In other words, you have the [00:16:00] table, and then you have the secondary table where the CIO sits. Yeah. And it's, I think, still a lot of organizations still have that sort of like you said, the CFO is complaining about how much money they gotta throw into this IT thing and... And I'll make one last point.

It's is we- it's our fault 'cause we haven't given them the value, the trust. We haven't been able to, in general, to explain. When the CFO is saying, "Hey, how come I put in this percentage? And I put this much money a year, and here's our IT budget. I don't see the value." That's not really their problem.

Evan Campbell: I don't blame the CFO- Yeah. Yeah, no ... in that scenario, and, that, that's what drove the great offshoring. The- Yeah, 

John Willis: that's right ... 

Evan Campbell: the C- the CFO, shortly after exclaiming, "All I get back are gibberish and excuses," says, "You know what? I might as well send this whole thing offshore to some vendor where I spend half as much for a developer to get the same amount of nothing back."

Yeah. And now the, the problem was, the [00:17:00] fallacy you know, was that he d- they weren't looking at the whole system. And they moved the constraint- Yeah ... but they didn't actually ultimately save money. They ended up... all the money they saved per developer hour got absorbed by the additional testing, the more detailed requirements, the language difficulties and defects and delays all of those things.

But, and we're gonna see the same... We're seeing the same thing with AI, by the way. AI, application development. It just moves the constraint. But yeah, so your point about the seat at the table it is necessary, but it's not sufficient. The thing that I think drives as much as any single attributable quality that drives the 70% failure rate of strategic initiatives in corporations is the fact that strategy deployment is weak.

They're... It's not competent. It's not effective. [00:18:00] And if you can't deploy your strategic objectives throughout the organization with clarity in a measurable way that's decomposed and granular and relevant to every re- part of the organization in a way that's understandable- You can't be aligned horizontally.

We know in the bad old days of MBOs, the way they were implemented it was this downhill cascade of gold manure that was passed from one employ- from the boss to the employee. "Here's your goal. Here's your quarterly goal. Now take it and go, and maybe you'll get a bonus." That doesn't really inspire a lot of ownership and accountability, and frequently those goals were not really relevant.

They didn't ladder up that to the strategic objectives of the company. So then you got these really powerful silos, sales, marketing, operations, finance HR. And because you haven't really aligned [00:19:00] horizontally, the, the leaders of each of these silos control the goals and rewards in a parochial manner that benefits them ac- they're accruing power budget, and influence, and prestige in the organization.

So they're all optimizing their silos for their own benefit, and by definition, a strategic initiative requires the horizontal cooperation of many departments- ... to succeed. I, so OKRs it's just goals and measures, same as MBOs. Hoshin Kanri has it. V2MOM at Salesforce, same thing. But the r- the really, the powerful differentiator, which you could use with any goal framework- Okay

is that you're engaging the employees, and the teams, and the functions in the organization really deeply in the conversation about how they contribute to the outcomes- Yeah ... that the corporation is trying, or the business unit or the [00:20:00] product line is trying to achieve. And that gets you a level of focus, understanding, accountability, and then you're also asking them to align horizontally to make sure that these objectives can be achieved.

And so anyway, that, that's a bit of a riff, but,

John Willis: No it's good because I, I think that's where you fundamentally agree. Or in other words, like my point, I think you have to go in, most Large consulting organizations come in and talk to the senior leadership. They, they wanna get that handshake, and everybody's, you know, and they're like, "Oh, we get your strategy."

Then they go to the next tier of leadership, and they get their view, and it literally, the information funnel just starts, collapsing. And by the time they get, or even get to the people who do the work- 

Evan Campbell: Yeah ... they 

John Willis: won't understand the people who do the work, 'cause they'll tell you the gold.

They'll tell you what, what doesn't work. They'll tell you the broken s- silos. 

Evan Campbell: Yeah. 

John Willis: You put a team- 

Evan Campbell: Yeah, the ones that are off running their own show. Totally. [00:21:00] Yeah. And they're like, 

John Willis: yeah, no, like 

Evan Campbell: you- I've wor- I've worked with some great companies. I worked with a fant... I tell this story in the book.

I worked with a fantastic oil and gas exploration equipment company that had been acquired by a really huge conglomerate in the en- energy industry, and they were forced into a bunch of standardized operating model stuff. 

Yeah. One example being procurement policies that ultimately made this- small, fast-moving, incredibly innovative company unable to do prototyping, unable to innovate, unable to develop new products, and thereby disappoint their entire customer base, their brand.

All of their cus- their customer reputation was based on their responsiveness, their innovativeness, and these amazing sensor technologies for oil and gas exploration. And the parent company that bought them [00:22:00] forced them into a bunch of operating model-type decisions or r- regulations that essentially destroyed the company.

The parent company divested them five years after acquiring them, and it was a disaster that I was fairly deeply involved with, but I... Nobody could overcome the parent company's rigidity. 

John Willis: Yeah. No, it's funny. There's, i'm a Goldratt geek, so there's people that do sort of knockoff Goldratt.

There, there's the Gold... There's the sort of the archetypal Goldratt story. The Phoenix Project, they did, right? There is a- Yeah ... there's a, there is a in, in Phoenix Project it's Brent, and, and Alex is Jonah in the Gold- in the Gold. And somebody wrote a really great...

It wasn't a great written book, but it was called Velocity, I think, and it was written by another author, but used the exact... And company had this big company that was heavily into Lean Six Sigma, right? And they bought this manufacturing company out of North Carolina that was, like, had really tuned the place up with [00:23:00] theory of constraints and, and so they were doing all that, and they forced them into the Lean Six Sigma thing. And there's a scene in the in the b- I kinda wish they'd make this part into a movie, but where the the New York office guy goes down and starts explaining how they have to do waste management and all, and then, the...

You can almost see the dialogue of the North Carolina accent. "I don't know. I think if you do all that, it's just gonna be a lot of excess inventory, and that's somehow gonna get us in big trouble with the finance depart..." 

Evan Campbell: Yeah, I'm a big fan of theory of constraints as well, and also Don Reinertsen's work in lean product development.

And I did a bunch of work with a big manufacturing conglomerate that had a bunch of divisions all over the country, and I spent a couple of years doing lean product development, and the sponsor was their global Six Sigma group. And it was really interesting. I'm not hostile to Six Sigma per se.

Statistical process [00:24:00] control techniques, and techniques that allow you to measure vary- variability in repetitious processes have their place, and they're powerful. But also understanding that product development and innovation is a different domain where variability is not as much the enemy.

And it is interesting to observe how many Six Sigma black belts don't really understand lean principles especially in the product development context. 

John Willis: Yeah, I did Six Sigma before so I worked at GE Capital and, y- you get a green belt when you show up, so I'm not bragging that I had a green belt.

My, my wife was a black belt though. And and the they were, I think, s- like the OKR as the Six Sigma. So the Lean Six Sigma really confused me, to be honest with you. By the time they smashed those two together I think they lost all s- all credibility, in, in all honesty.

But Six Sigma by itself, and by the way, if you look at systems process control, Six Sigma was a bastardized version of... [00:25:00] and, but it goes back to the core of all the things. The things that intentionally were trying to be done at GE Capital with Six Sigma were beautiful.

Beautiful. The problem was, and it's the same reason with MBOs, the same reason with OKRs, the same reason, it's how humans tried it. They, the, the gravity of it is to get to this judgment and it has to be, and it's... 'cause Six Sigma became how many defects per million. In- instead of the process, everybody had to show up for every black belt meeting showing how they improved their process by...

And I know that that was not the way it was intended to be, but they had to show their process and, I knew a guy that, one of my peers, he owned all the Linux servers, and he'd use uptime And I, like I had a ragtag developer, pre-DevOps guys that did all this like crazy stuff, fixed people's servers, fixed this.

And I could never get my sort of my, my [00:26:00] defects per million or the... and it was annoying me 'cause this guy'd win an award every month. And that's the other thing, like he'd be on the poster of so it swayed- ... like it swayed everybody to like how's he doing it?

Oh." And I asked one time, I said, "Can I do how many times my office door opens and closes?" Because that's no different than server uptime in a place that has like literally, three motor generators and a battery farm, behind that, right? But I think that the, the point is we tend to, we tend to we ha- we fall into this trap of judging humans or workers or organizations by purely the goals, and the goals that we set, right?

And they become the leaderboard and and I think that's a hard thing to break because, almost- 

Evan Campbell: It i- it is. And you've heard me say in our previous conversations that, the, the quickest way to destroy an OKR program- ... is to tie it [00:27:00] to performance management and rewards.

As soon as the im- I- it is so important to emphasize... and, so many OKR initiatives crash and burn- That's right ... just like any other strategy deployment and execution methodology 'cause it's a change initiative too. So- That's right ... they fail at the same rate as all the other strategic initiatives.

That's right. But the quickest, surest way to make it worthless as a strategy realization process is to give the impression to the employees that it's tied to rewards. 'Cause as soon as they think that- 

John Willis: Yeah ... 

Evan Campbell: you've seen the last ambitious objective they're ever gonna set for themselves. Yeah.

And we're just back to the bad old days of MBOs where we're, we're sandbagging our goals, and then we're gaming our numbers and getting our bonus and- Yeah ... giving it just enough attention to make sure we get our bonus, and then going off and doing whatever the hell we're gonna do. It, yeah it doesn't take much to ruin an OKR program and turn [00:28:00] it into just another worthless corporate MBO program.

John Willis: Yeah, and I guess so I kind of wanna get to the question I wanna ask you but we, but it seems almost like it's inevitable that it always falls that way. And you have so many crosswinds. You have the, you know, so the investment community, you have Wall Street, you have, advi- board advisors.

And they're all they get back to the, in a lot of ways how much money do you make, and why are you making money here, and and, and- Sure ... I mean- 

Evan Campbell: Revenue isn't an o- a good outcome, an objective. Yeah. No. Re- reve- revenue i- you know, growth in revenue or market share is the, is a signal, a, a lagging indicator that your- yeah

that your strategy is being realized. But it is not a strategy or an appropriate objective unto itself, right? There are means, there are key business drivers levers of the business that get you to that. Your strategy is, first of [00:29:00] all answering the questions leveraging Roger Martin.

Once you've got your vision and your mission, the, the next question you need to answer are where do we play and how do we win? And I, I adapted that from Roger Martin's work because it, it is just such a simple, clear test of whether a company has a strategy. And you can... this goes all the way down to a product or what have you.

If you if your employees can't answer the, the simple question of where do we play and how do we win, you haven't deployed your strategy successfully. And it's also it's like what you were saying earlier, John. We organizations tend to embrace this superficial, everything's fine, we're all in...

"oh, yeah, Evan, come on in, help us with strategy. We don't really need to talk about the strategy per se. You just need to help us build the processes to realize it." And then I get in the boardroom with all the executives, and they've got this superficial alignment, this [00:30:00] pretend consensus- Yeah

that they all agree on their strategy and they're all good with it. The damn strategy is so vague and filled with clouds and fluffy bunnies that, like anybody, you can't disagree with anybody. 

John Willis: That's right, you can't disagree. Yeah, you, you- ... you literally get to a point where you're using vocabulary that everybody agrees on because it, they can't agree on anything else other than the vocabulary.

Evan Campbell: Yeah. Yeah. If, if everything in your strategy is like yeah only an idiot wouldn't do that, then 

John Willis: Play devil's advocate then. Then let's break down the, how do you, where do you play and how do you win? So how do you sort of- You know, how do you decouple that so that it isn't the superficial, "Oh, you know- that's-

we play in a global economy, and we win because we're the best at, in the global economy, right? Yay." 

Evan Campbell: Exactly. And I'm in that boardroom with all these people, and I start doing these little tests where I have them individually fill out some sticky notes- 

John Willis: [00:31:00] Okay ... 

Evan Campbell: on simple questions like those, and, what's your most promising market segment?

Who's your biggest competitor? If you could, if you could seize one beachhead in the competitive marketplace, what... and I put these up, and it's instantly apparent that they're- Yeah ... there's, they're utterly divergent. So what are some tests? Is the cl- is the strategy where do we play, how do we win expressed in a way that clearly excludes some strategic options?

And you can tell in that room when that superficial alignment starts to evaporate when people are getting pissed off because things they wanna do lie outside the definition of where we play and how we win, and they realize that they're not gonna be able to run their own little departmental fun fair because some of the stuff they wanted to do the pet [00:32:00] projects, the initiatives, the budget lines that they wanted are gonna get gored because of the increasing focus of the actual strategy.

So that's one signal that you're headed the right direction. And then another good test is this one, like I was saying. If the, if your strategy, if your objectives are expressed in a way where every one of them is like only an idiot wouldn't do that- 

John Willis: Yeah ... 

yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. 

Evan Campbell: This is so freaking obvious that what's the opposite of it? 

The opposite of it is something only a moron would do. So that's not a very clarifying strategic objective. Can we drill down harder on, on, something that really is unique, differentiating, clarifying, focusing?

But that it... until that point- 

John Willis: Yeah ... 

Evan Campbell: you're not done with that first phase of s- the first phase of strategy definition, strategy formulation. The second phase is strategy deployment, where you're decomposing it and communicating it through all layers of the organization with an effort to overcome strategy decay, which is [00:33:00] confusing the signal, making the employees think the wrong message.

And then the third phase is actually tracking the execution of the strategy day to day. You don't just do OKRs at the beginning of the quarter and the end of the quarter and, and realize, oh, we didn't hit any of our OKRs. What do you know? Maybe next quarter. Y- every, every week or two you need to say this, this product, this initiative, this team is moving in accordance with the objectives we've set for them, or we intercede and adjust.

John Willis: Yeah, I think, the thing I, I've found is again, most of the time I'm working bottom up and I'm not in that... the one- the way I usually wind up in that room that you start with is that I have to do my readout, so I get a one-on-one with a CIO, b- it- and it's rare because this takes a lot of trust and, they're like, "Why are you not using the Big Four?"

And, "Why are you using this guy?" And and then when I read it out, it seems like you get that level of [00:34:00] "Yeah, no, we agree with you." Okay. Yeah ... but again it just seems like the, it's almost like a flash and it goes away, right? Like in other words, the like I had one large bank, one of the largest asset holding banks in the world, and I remember sitting in front of six or seven DCIOs and reading out.

And, at the end of it, the leader of that group said, you'd be surprised to hear that we all agree with you." And that was l- like, like wasting literally, this is like 10, 15 years ago, like 10, 10 years ago wasting like 3 to 400 million on a billion dollar IT budget and them agreeing with me.

Sure. Then, "Okay, thanks. Here's your, 100 grand for helping us out."

Evan Campbell: I've lived that same thing so many times. I've wor- I worked with one of the biggest banks in Manhattan, and, they brought me on... I had diagnosed some serious portfol- i- and this was predominantly IT, oh, yeah. Yeah. I prefer now to work in [00:35:00] enterprise portfolio management where there's a, a bigger range of more exciting types of initiatives and where, improving portfolio returns 10% means- 

John Willis: Yeah, big time. Yeah ... 

Evan Campbell: yeah. Yeah. But, the, a big I- a big bank with- Yeah. Oh no ... a big IT department you wanna help, so- 

John Willis: 300 million is 300 million.

Yeah. 

Evan Campbell: Yeah. Yeah I'd done some assessment. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Evan Campbell: Came back, ref- showed them the mirror of themselves. They agreed with everything. The CIO was thrilled with the basic prescription for where we were gonna go. And then as so often happens, th- the organization, the leadership just wasn't really r- willing to sponsor real change, and l- let me just spend a minute on this w- because it's an interesting- Sure.

Absolutely ... it's got a couple good lessons about portfolio management and change management. So I have, let me go back. So this bank IT organization, their sponsors who were p- fairly powerful business line and [00:36:00] function leaders and their delegates, people with big budgets, VP titles.

Everybody in a bank has a VP title- ... but they were like real VPs. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Evan Campbell: For real, yeah. People that own P&Ls. 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Evan Campbell: And they're just pissed at IT. They hate this IT organization. Yeah. They're in this demand management process where their expectations are just continually being misset and then violated.

Nothing shows up on time. Every time one of the projects releases something, it's all the wrong stuff, and it's broken, and it's not what they asked for. Just really angry, disgusted stakeholders. And it's obvious as hell, theory of constraints, where's the real bottleneck, where do we start, root cause analysis, that this organization in its delivery operation is just chaos.

Yeah. So common in IT. They've got 150-plus percent of the WIP that they can effectively process in the [00:37:00] organization, and they're moving people around all the time, and the projects are all getting rejiggered, and developers are working on two or three different projects in a day, time sliced by the hour.

They have no idea what their capacity to deliver is. They're in... They're not measurable. There's no transparency. There's no stability. They... So they have no idea what their throughput is. Surprise, they've never hit a date because they have no idea, no ability to project a cut line on a backlog and say, "This is what we'll have by such and such based on historically observed throughput."

So this is in a sense, a statistical process control problem because the, the process isn't measurable. And the variability is so insane that it can't even be mathematically computed. Oh Evan, it's really hard for us to change delivery, and oh, I don't know how we could possibly reduce work in process.

We committed to 150 [00:38:00] projects. Yeah. If you say that we had to shut down 30 of them, people would be very angry and upset with us. That's a very political thing. It's like if you don't address any of this, you'll never know what the capacity of the organization to deliver is, so you'll never be able at the portfolio level to set an expectation or force a trade-off decision in the demand-supply matching process.

So no, Evan, I think you really ought to work on the demand management piece and just fix the people- Ah yeah ... who are angry with us. 

John Willis: Sure sure. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. No I 

Evan Campbell: get that. You know- Yeah ... I was... It was six months, of almost every week in Manhattan, and in the end, They weren't willing to address any of the underlying...

they wanted to address the symptoms. They wanted me to go fix somebo- they wanted me to go fix their sponsors who were mad at them. 

John Willis: Yeah. I know. 

Evan Campbell: But they w- they wouldn't address their inability to deliver. 

John Willis: Yeah. No, it's, And, it's the... how many times I'm sure you get to where you talk to a CIO and "How can I [00:39:00] fix my people?"

I'm like, "Yeah, wait a minute. We need to fix you." 

That's the difference between me and McKinsey, right? Not to just point out they're never gonna say that,

I love telling the CIO, I always feel like, maybe my last gig before I truly stop doing any of this, which I think will be never, I want to put my feet on their oak desk with a cigar and get- 'Cause I tell them in the beginning, I say, I w- the thing difference between me and anybody else you, most of the big companies you're looking at is I'm gonna tell you things that you're not gonna like."

"Oh, John, I want to hear." No. I'm gonna tell you right now, you are not gonna like what I'm gonna tell you." And I'm like, "But that's the deal," is like, "I'm gonna tell you this and here's why. Because I'm not trying to put people in here for another five years. I'm gonna be gone." And then at the end in the readout, like I swear, I'd like...

I- I've never done this, but I want to put my dirty boots up on their oak desk and have a cigar and have them- ... give me John's. "Bob, terrible," flick the ashes on his oak desk, and "What do you mean by terrible?" I'm like, "Let's put it this way. If you made airplanes, I wouldn't fly on them," and- ... and and I've had those kind of [00:40:00] conversations. I didn't put my dirty boots on their desk, but- 

... 

John Willis: And it takes a true leader to, A, want to actually hear the bad news 'cause they don't- ... they pay... And again, I'm just gonna say McKinsey and just when I say that, it means everybody, right?

Because they, they f- they, they want McKinsey because they're gonna feel comfortable with that, and the comfort is they're not gonna get in trouble because they brought McKinsey in. They're not, they're probably not gonna get, they're gonna basically tell McKinsey what they want them to do, and guys like us come in and say no," "That's not how we roll," and- Yeah ... and they don't, they don't want that, right? 

Evan Campbell: I got a really good example of that, of a, a specific version of that painful conver- I got a bunch of examples, actually. Oh, I 

John Willis: bet. I bet. 

Evan Campbell: One of them is, you started with, fix my people.

Okay. So I'm working with an insurance company IT department, it's the most boring [00:41:00] industry in the world. It's highly regulated. They're not very competitive because they don't have to be. 

Just tremendous complacency and an inward focus on competing for resources with one another insid-inside- Right

the company instead of outward facing. So the, "Oh, we're gonna... everybody's doing agile transformations, and so we're gonna become agile." And we're six months into this, and we finally formed some teams and, trying to clean up the excess width and make it measurable and implement some DevOps.

So it's like, so the, the CIO's we're six months into this, and I just don't feel like my teams are self-man- are g- are self-managing. They're not taking accountability. They're not seizing the initiative and being self..." It's you've been... This business has had an IT department for 25, 30 years- Yeah

where you've told them th- they've just been fingers on a keyboard. You haven't respected that they have [00:42:00] brains. You ta- give them tasks for every half-hour increment of their day with detailed specifications. They've never had to think. You've bred the brains out of this organization. Wow. The people who are self-actualized, who are interested in having an impact on a customer, who care about the software, they left.

John Willis: Sure. 

Evan Campbell: They left. Yeah. They spent a year here. They hated it, and they found another job as soon as they could get- Yeah ... their resume out. Yeah. H- how do you turn on a dime when, you've been breeding knowledge capital out of your development staff- 

John Willis: Wow. Yeah ... 

Evan Campbell: for the whole time you've had an IT department 

John Willis: Yeah.

No, it's, Yeah, again, I think the it's But then you got the turnover, right? That's another problem. Even when you find a great leader or that literally Will, can accept that, there's a guy named Sidney Dekker, he writes a lot of books about critical safety and safety management, Safety I, Safety II.

Really good overlaps with a lot of stuff that we do [00:43:00] for lean and DevOps and... But he- we asked him one time, what, what is, what is your definition of a safety culture? And it's it's a leader that can basically admit they're wrong. 

It's that simple, right?

That simple. Stand up in front of 20,000, 30,000 employees and say, "Hey, I was wrong," and sometimes that's hard to do, right? You take these, these big security breaches. I, I would... There was one, I remember at a conference I was on a panel and I talked about, doing transparent postmortems, public postmortems on a breach or something like that.

And, somebody from, American Express came up to me in the hallway, says, that's great, but American Express, you ain't gonna hear that happen." There are so many permutations of what it takes to do... it's one thing to be Amazon and explain, a breach and, or an outage or something.

It was an outage actually. And "Here's what happened. We made a mistake. We did this. We should have done that." But l- when, the financial responsibilities are really high

Evan Campbell: no, they're failing at a pretty high [00:44:00] rate, too. We've seen companies whose businesses are cybersecurity get hacked.

Yeah. And the supply chain hacks in particular are impressive. But, AI is... Everybody's freaked out. It's like, "Oh no, we've..." Anthropic has this new model that's gonna be, and they keep breaking out of their sandboxes. Yeah. It's the- Yeah ... the AI is breaking out of the sandbox, hacking stuff, getting on the internet when it's supposed to have an air gap from the internet.

Yeah, 

John Willis: no, 

Evan Campbell: it is- and then lying about what it did. And it's yeah, this is great, and now we've got, now we've got quantum computing coming very shortly on the heels of this virtually self-aware AI with enormous powers. And w- man, if we thought AI was disruptive- 

John Willis: Yeah, no, the, the...

we got a window on it. I've been... I'm writing a book about the history of quantum computing, and th- there's a window here, that... i, my biggest saying on quantum is, don't be paranoid, but be prepared. In other words, [00:45:00] it's coming, it's just not the hype that you're hearing right now that for the, it, put it this way. In our lifetime you and me, nobody's breaking 4096 RSA encryption. There, no, there is n- that is not gonna happen in probably even my kids' life but the AI thing is interesting, and I think we're probably gonna have to have another podcast on this one, but is that, we go back to the CFO that, those business units that have just been just frustrated for, the large P&L fits the units you talked about in the bank.

And, and, at some point, like being pessimistic, like out of all the things that we haven't worked and we're always threading the needle, this promise and delivery that isn't perfect, I think we are gonna see and we're s- we're seeing failures and people are not learning, and they're making the same mistakes over and over again that they've made in every tr- technology transformation.

But at some point, it's the outsourcing thing, [00:46:00] whereas I'm getting terrible results by putting, a half a billion or a billion dollars into software development in my organization, and I get crap. 

What if I just get a little better than... What if I get a little better than crap and I cut that down to, 100 grand and I use the, AI and like robotics and whatever, agentics and I think I, no matter how much we try to profess today, you still have to have system arc.

And I believe all this. I just think if I'm putting on my sort of being pessimistic, I, I think it's probably gonna... We're gonna see, we're gonna see the... I think business owners or leaders have been wanting to get rid of us forever. 

Evan Campbell: Yeah. 

John Willis: And I think, and it may wind up like outsourcing. Oh, 

Evan Campbell: and it's our own damn fault. Yeah. 

John Willis: Yeah, it is our own damn fault. That's right, and it may wind up outsourcing. Although, I'm a big fan of AI, and actually it... I think there's gonna be dr- there are dragons all over the place. There will be, [00:47:00] there'll be cleanups, there'll be, Three Mile Island type disasters.

But at the end of the day it might be the normalized path for businesses, in, in some ways because it just... i'm watching people who three years ago would've told me that it could never work in a large bank and are now saying that they haven't written a line of code in a year and hadn't done a code reveal in six months 

Evan Campbell: Haven't done a code review?

John Willis: Yeah. Yeah, I'm talking about not-

Evan Campbell: The AI- 

John Willis: Yeah. 

Evan Campbell: Yeah ... needs twice as much code review as any human developer ever did. 

John Willis: Yeah. I think... there's more volume, and then we still got the value problem, right? 

Evan Campbell: I... i... A friend of mine who's a very senior developer and architect and systems guy was telling me a funny story.

One of the business unit leaders, in, in the company came to him and he said, "Hey, look, I used Claude Code, and I-" ... "I made this beautiful [00:48:00] app. It's been something I've been wanting IT to do forever, and, I spent a week screwing around and, here it is, and it's 96% functionally what I want."

"

Evan Campbell: And I think it's almost ready to go into production, but could I give it to you, and could add those last few features and changes to get it from 96 to 100% of the functionality I want? And then, we can put it in production, and you guys can support it." So my, my friend looks at it, and he goes in, to the functions that are relevant to the the features that this guy wants changed, and he finds a, a set of nested if statements 32 layers deep.

John Willis: Yeah. 32 

Evan Campbell: layers of if statements. It's like- 

John Willis: Yeah, but the g- the, the thing is, the, the really good architects and coders are not... they're not producing that type of AI code. They have skills, they have context. And they're using the same tools [00:49:00] To calibrate security risks and all that.

In other words- ... again all those things about, anthropic and fable models breaking out and OpenAI, breaking out of these sandboxes. All the strengths that they have from an adversarial perspective, people are using...

Intelligent architect design people are using those same adversarial attacks to attack 

Evan Campbell: their code. Yeah. No, I think pen tests are getting better. But I also think that in my experience, and I go way back in software architecture to design patterns and-

... 

Evan Campbell: enterprise architecture software patterns and all of that stuff, right?

And late... there are still people who have some of that experience, but they're largely self-taught. The computer science programs aren't- Yeah, they don't ... really teaching architecture and, They

John Willis: never have, for, for- 

Evan Campbell: They never have ... business 

John Willis: applications 

Evan Campbell: or- and [00:50:00] honestly, most of us that really mastered that stuff just had to go through the hard work of- 

John Willis: Experience.

Experience. 

Evan Campbell: Yeah ... reading the books and, and really understanding object-oriented programming and patterns and all of these things. The percentage of people who are writing software today who have that level of understanding and mastery is even less than it was when you and I were coming up.

Yeah. 

John Willis: No, I totally agree. 

Evan Campbell: Yeah. And so the question is, if the average software developer is

Evan Campbell: [00:00:00] Less and less aware of architecture and good design. And AI is taking more and more responsibility for filling that gap. Are we really getting better architected, more sustainable, extensible,

John Willis: A- and I'm playing devil's- Just- I'm playing devil's advocate here, 'cause I don't know. I don't know the answer.

I don't. I'll be the first... I don't, and I don't have a strong opinion. I have fears. But, I I've had this debate with people, and I ask the question, did the calculator replacing the slide ruler make us dumber, A, B, smarter, or C, didn't matter? We could argue about autonomous vehicles all day long, but if you live in Atlanta right now, there, you're like...

I saw four in a row the other day. So I mean the, the question might be we fundamentally agree that, we're losing the skills, we're not gonna architecture, but maybe at the end of the day the aggregate [00:01:00] abstraction of what gets created just might not matter, and that might be the way that things- 

Evan Campbell: Yeah.

I agree. I think ultimately though just not, to take it from the abstract to more specific, like the great offshoring,

John Willis: Yeah. That's- 

Evan Campbell: People are looking for a magic bullet to save- Yeah ... time and money. Okay. And what they're not acknowledging is, again you move the constraint. You need a lot fewer developer hours. But, in- instead of it, the, the process in terms of throughput being shaped like this with, a lot of developers in the middle of the diamond, being the constraint, now it's an hourglass. Yeah. Yeah. And the developer part is skinny, but the need to do behavior-driven development or write Gherkin or have some kind of executable- Yeah

requirement- 

... 

Evan Campbell: And infinitely more care about what the system should do, as well [00:02:00] as much more validation on the back end because AI behaves more unpredictably than experienced developers, is people are not turning, repurposing the investment the savings that they got from the developers into the front- Yeah

end of the process where the new- Yeah ... constraints live. 

John Willis: And I think that there's gonna be a learning curve there, right? In other words, like right now th- what... we're in pure chaos, right? Nobody's calibrating value. People are, we have token leaderboards and all that. But y- to be... You heard my pessimistic side.

My optimistic side is I truly believe it's people like us, and there's a large group of us, who understand what the meta i- ingredients need to be to fit into this new world. So may- you don't have to code, but I've been playing around with wordly mapping and how that sort of works with sort of decision-making with AI.

So augmenting decision AI using something called social practice theory or [00:03:00] some of the stuff that Dave Snowden does with Cynefin. I think the key here is not like you have to go back to basics the way we would've done it five years ago. In your book, Adapt to Win, I think the real secret sauce is going to be look where the, the puck is going- right? And and try to wedge in, like instead of fighting, and I'm not saying you're doing, fighting the resistance of, "Oh, this is all gonna be terrible. It's all gonna be terrible." I'm sorry. Yeah. It is moving in this direction, so how do we know the things that need to be injected in there?

And I think that's gonna be a great opportunity. 

Evan Campbell: I totally agree. I think ultimately the smarter, more enlightened organizations with good leadership are going to get great benefit from AI. And then we're, I don't know. I probably could pick a better metaphor, but, you and I did, have done a ton of DevOps transformations- right

stuff like that. Okay. So how many organizations, IT shops always, h- have we seen who [00:04:00] said, "DevOps is supposed to be this really cool thing. Hey we're doing a DevOps transformation. We just created a DevOps department- Yeah ... who's gonna be in the middle between development- yeah ... and DevOps."

Yeah. And it's like, "No, you misread the whole book." Yeah.

John Willis: Yeah. That's the 70%, right? Let's assume there's a 70% are gonna get anything they do wrong. Whether it's AI or DevOps or, or coaching Carry or, Connery or, whatever, lead product development.

Yeah. Yeah. 

Evan Campbell: It's oh my God, not again. Ugh. All right. Congratulations with your DevOps department. Now we have another step in the dysfunctional chain. 

John Willis: Yeah. That... We definitely need to do this again, 'cause I wanted to go a little deeper into Einstein's stuff, the, his, I think there's some stuff there I... You have a whole lot of experience in areas I haven't dove into a lot deeper. And, But tell, give us the little, why somebody should read your book 

Evan Campbell: The book really starts with this problem that organizations are [00:05:00] by and large really struggling to successfully execute their static strategies.

And the world is moving faster and faster. The world, your business, whatever it is, will never move more slowly than it does today. It's only accelerating. And not only do you need the foundational ability to execute your strategic objectives efficiently and successfully because, a, a company with A-level strategy and B-level execution will be crushed by a competitor- Wow

that's got a B-level strategy with A-level execution every time. So- Yeah. 

John Willis: Boy, I 

Evan Campbell: love that ... learn to execute strategy. To do that, you have to overcome inertia, you have to overcome the tendency of every organization to confuse strategic intent as it gets deployed through the organization, and then you can start to talk about becoming strategically adaptable.

But if you can't execute the strategy you got today, and [00:06:00] most organizations can't you're never going to adapt to be resilient and disruptive in the market in the future. And this, this book I wrote, it gives you a complete framework all the way down to the investment decision-making that's occurring in the enterprise.

If... don't tell me your strategy, or at least you won't convince me of your strategy by showing me your PowerPoint decks. What'll convince me that you're executing your strategy is looking at the investments that you've made in the portfolio system, which initiatives you're funding, and how fast you're killing the ones that aren't producing results.

John Willis: Got it. Yep, yep. Yeah. 

Evan Campbell: So you need that steel thread that carries your strategy from the top all the way down to the day-to-day decisions that portfolio managers and product managers are making about how they're expending or investing your scarce resources in the organization. 

John Willis: See, that's a great example.

To me that is... Like I [00:07:00] could believe a world where efficient people like my friend can make that statement in- high consequence financial institutions that they literally have not written any code in a year, and they haven't done code reviews in a long time, if they are applying and continue applying, that, what you just described, right?

Evan Campbell: But okay, granted, that's efficiency. But what about effectiveness? Are the trade-off decisions, are the product roadmaps, are the features, are the- Yeah ... the focus of the investment of where the spend on the technology budget- Yeah ... is it producing the outcome- yeah ... that are maximizing the company's ability to win?

John Willis: Yeah, no, and I think that to... what I'm saying is I think that is the the point you made about are we willing to kill the ones that aren't, that, and then, okay. 'Cause that's the problem right now is CEOs are telling their CIOs or their group that, "Hey, I think we can get 30% out, on our, out of our 30,000 employees, I [00:08:00] think we can get 30% more efficiency if we give everybody their own AI bot."

And, and- ... that's just, a tsunami of techno let and disaster coming down the pipe, right? 

But an organization thinks about a structure like your book describes, Adapt to Win, and says, "Okay, I want productivity, but let's figure out how we allocate product development life cycle, and how we calibrate what is working and what isn't working."

Exactly. And I still think fundamentally organizations are, or businesses have, I call it the sort of Kobayashi Maru is value. They just it's the, it's the no-win scenarios. I think, what is your value, and how do you calibrate value other than market responses to what you do, right?

Evan Campbell: Yeah. And it has to be more even than just ROI, 'cause that's a huge-

John Willis: yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah. 

Evan Campbell: But yeah, and yes, ROI, RRNPV, those are all things that a monkey with a calculator can- That's right. That's right ... can 

John Willis: do. Yeah. 

Evan Campbell: But strategic value, and this is a huge focus- Yeah ... of [00:09:00] really the focus of the portfolio management part of the book is how do you objectively...

what is a, a system for fairly and objectively assigning strategic value to an initiative, like an innovation initiative? If your organization only prioritizes and funds initiatives based on some variant of ROI, you'll never fund any i- innovation initiative. 

John Willis: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. And you go back 

Evan Campbell: to that- so how- ... 

John Willis: quote, right? If I let my- 

Evan Campbell: Yeah ... 

John Willis: customers tell me to yeah. Yeah 

Evan Campbell: Values strategic value is 10 times harder to prioritize than financial value. 

John Willis: Yeah. No I agree. And, going back to another book I like by Mark Schwartz is The Art of Business Value, and, he, he...

I've had people sit there and argue with him that customer value may not matter, right? Depends on, like Nordstrom- so here, yeah, we just opened up a can of worms. But but his argument was, like blanket business value or the customers or [00:10:00] customer value in, in a company like Nordstrom, it...

Not every customer walks in the door is treated equally, right? Or a nonprofit thinks about... in other words, to your point you can't look at things as an ROI, as a, customer value. And maybe it's the way people think about customer value, but it's usually turns into the customer's always right and that's not- Oh

universally true. 

Evan Campbell: No. Yeah. This is, where we win, how we win, where we play and how we win is the answer to what is value for the organization. 

John Willis: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's the same thing. But the... It goes back to the platitudish discussions is like, "The way we're gonna win is we- the customer always is correct."

Yeah, nah. And customer value, and okay, great. And what does that mean? Oh, like- 

Evan Campbell: And motherhood and apple pie- 

John Willis: America. Target treats a customer way different than Nordstrom treats a potential customer walking in the door, right? Yes. Or Walmart or- Yeah, Walmart.

Yeah. Yeah, all right. 

Evan Campbell: Yeah. 

John Willis: Good stuff, man. I hope you had as much fun as I did. [00:11:00] 

Evan Campbell: I enjoyed it. Yeah. I always enjoy talking to you, John. 

John Willis: Yeah, it's great. We'll do it again, too. I think we'll, 'Cause I do wanna get a little deeper. I'd 

Evan Campbell: love to. We could do a deep dive on the portfolio stuff. 

John Willis: Yeah, I wanna do that.

You just... There was so many things I kept thinking about that as we were going through, it was like... a- and then I realized at some point I'm not gonna get to those questions, so- ... it's all good. All right thank you so much. We'll put up a link to your book and all your information, and is there any place- Yeah, 

Evan Campbell: make sure the website adaptto win.co gets on 

John Willis: there some- Okay.

We'll definitely do that. 

Evan Campbell: Should've plugged that, but, 

John Willis: No we'll get all that in the the show notes and all that stuff, so good. So- 

Evan Campbell: All right ... bye, 

John Willis: Brian. 

Evan Campbell: Sounds good. 

John Willis: Thank you. 

Evan Campbell: Thanks, buddy. 

John Willis: All right.

Evan Campbell: I'll talk to- Appreciate you having me on, really do. Oh, it was great.

I enjoyed it. 

John Willis: Yeah, it was really good. 

Evan Campbell: Take care. 

John Willis: All right.