Chris Mailander

Every team that I work with faces an invisible gap, and it emerges slowly, but in a profound way. And you’ve seen it as well, I’m sure, which is that the CEO lays out a brilliant vision, the board hears it, and that forecast becomes a bold, aspirational plan for the company’s performance.

But what actually happens day in and day out, in the thousands of decisions that need to get made about the business — and we see it in capital allocation, the hiring choices that get made, the product investments — each of these domains start to reveal decisions which are more ordinary, and the company’s performance is more average.

That’s the gap. Between the aspiration and the everyday is a gap, and two different decision architectures happen. The strategic plan says we’re going to be transformational, we’re going to be bold. And actual reality is: we preserve. We’re more ordinary, and we’re more average.

This is not a strategy problem. It’s an execution problem. And the challenge is being able to document it in real time, over time, in order to make it visible, to provide the evidence that’s necessary for a team to understand how those thousands of decisions need to get made so that you can achieve the aspirational objectives.

Once we were able to do so, once we were able to demonstrate the cross-correlations that were going on in how capital is being allocated, about how decisions are being made, about how investments are being made, about where people are lined up, and how that decision architecture affected the day-to-day decisions and norms, tens of millions of dollars in enterprise value were created.

And that’s what I love most about what we’re doing. We’re not selling advice, and we’re not selling insights. We’re not selling some sort of deliverable that’s going to sit on your shelf.

What we’re selling is performance. That’s Mailander.