Must-Win Battles is an essential companion for leaders who want to cut through an array of uncoordinated initiatives, and bring focus and renewed energy to their organizations. It  will show you  how to identify and agree on the key critical challenges that will make or break your business, and help you to mobilize people and resources to achieve those goals.  

Contents     Chapter 1         The Must-Win Battle Journey   This chapter provides a roadmap for the book, introducing and defining must-win battles (MWBs) and what the journey to achieving them involves.        Section I         Preparing the Journey   Chapter 2         Understanding Your Starting Conditions   Every business embarks on their MWB journey from a different place.  These unique starting conditions will impact the choice of MWBs, the urgency surrounding their execution and the relative emphasis on the emotional versus the intellectual elements of the journey.  This chapter highlights the four critical starting conditions that need to be understood, provides tools to think about each, and translates them into implications for the MWB process.   Chapter 3         What does it take to lead on a MWB journey?   Even if the business conditions point towards a MWB journey, there is one more critical question for the leader before she or he commits to the process: am I capable of leading it?  Leading a MWB journey is a big challenge, requiring skills and capabilities of a leader that go well beyond managing “business as usual”.  Preparing for the journey explores the “leadership imperatives” or challenges inherent in the MWB process.  It offers tools to assess the leader’s readiness to lead the journey, which can entail high personal risk and need to change…as well as approaches to manage these risks and demands.  Because once it starts there really is no opportunity to turn back.      Section II        Engaging the Team   Chapter 4         Opening Windows: Sharing Perspectives and Realities   Opening windows activities and exercises start the group moving forward on both the emotional and intellectual dimensions in parallel.  The aims are to build a shared understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the business, while at the same time, surfacing the team’s personal feelings about how the top team works together.  Detailed outlines of exercises together with real-world examples illustrate how the transparency of the discussions begins sharing and aligning the team’s perspectives and starting new ways of working together.    Chapter 5         Defining the Battles: Colliding to Decide   As the team moves into the iterative process that is defining must-win battles, things are starting to get real.  There will be winners and losers as the long list of potential initiatives gets robustly challenged to reach the shortlist of 3 to 5 battles that will receive the lion’s share of management attention and resources in the coming months and years.  The shared understandings and openness built by in the previous stage are the critical background for ensuring productive dialogue at this stage.  The characteristics of well-chosen MWBs are outlined, along with exercises and real-world examples to illustrate how this process works in practice.   Chapter 6         Breaking the Silos: Committing to One Agenda   Even the best-chosen list of MWBs runs the risk of failure if the team is not committed to implementing it back at the office.  The final part of the kick-off process is about making this critical emotional commitment to a collective agenda – moving away from silo-b

  Must-Win Battlesis an essential companion for leaders who want to cut through an array of uncoordinated initiatives, and bring focus and renewed energy to their organizations.   “Moving a company to the next level requires confronting the right challenges, and Peter Killing, Thomas Malnight, and Tracey Keys show how to pick your battles and then how to win them.  Their Must-Win Battles provides a practical playbook for unleashing and aligning the intellectual and emotional energies essential for any business triumph.”  Michael Useem, Director-Center for Leadership and Change Management, The Wharton School and author of The Leadership Moment    “In Must-Win Battles Peter Killing and Thomas Malnight have distilled their richly varied experiences drawn from many organizations over many years.  Together they have created a practical handbook for all managers who are interested in re-energizing and improving their business performance.  Must-Win Battles is easy to read and brimful with practical advice; well worth a few hours of your time.” Iain Ferguson CBE, Chief Executive, Tate & Lyle PLC Named European Businessman of the Year by Forbes Magazine, 2005    “Working with must-win battles has fundamentally changed our approach to where we seek growth in the market and the way we engage our people in realizing these goals. Must-win battles are the glue that ties the business together globally, that everyone understands and can contribute to.  The process clarifies for everyone the long-term vision and business direction, where to allocate resources and why it is important to get aligned.”  Diego Bevilacqua, President, Foodsolutions, Unilever   “Every executive knows that there are certain battles that must be won for the business tobe successful.  This great new book provides a real-world, step-by-step approach to choosing the right battles in a way that helps unleash the organizational will to achieve them.  Must Win Battles is a wonderful contribution to the art and science of management!  So much so that it’s inspired me to launch my own MWB journey.” Bob Rieder, President & CEO Cardiome Pharma Corp.  

Must Win Battles shows business leaders how to identify and agree on the key critical challenges that will make or break their business, and helps them to mobilize their people and resources to achieve those goals.

The book is structured like the executive programme at IMD upon which it is based, and is full of the real voices of participants who have made theMWB "journey". Reveals a tested framework for deciding what is "must-win," as opposed to merely urgent or everyday. Shows how to focus people, resources and time on the most decisive activities and challenges. Unique, unlike other books, Must-Win Battles bridges the gap between strategy development and implementation by tackling the intellectual and emotional challenges simultaneously.