We live in a business era where the fractional chief executive officer is becoming indispensable. Before considering hiring a fractional CMO or CFO, I’d always start with a Fractional Chief People Officer, such as Susannah Robinson. She has worked in big-company HR for more than twenty years and has written a simple and pragmatic guide on organizational design for small businesses. In this conversation, we discuss her new book, Beyond the Boxes and Lines.
Episode Highlights
- The reason Mark appreciates Susannah’s consulting business model.
- A few Disney tidbits and insights.
- The role of Partnership for Talent and who they serve.
- The professor who didn’t use a textbook.
- The plight of the business owner who drops in new hires without giving thought to organizational design.
- The idea of team members stradling more than one seat on the Jim Collins bus.
- Organizational design is not just for big businesses.
- The difficulty in marketing organizational design.
- The origin story of Susannah’s Next Step Framework.
- David Ulrich said, “Organizational design has four times the impact on a business outcome than business competencies.”
- Peter Drucker would love Susannah’s three questions on organizational alignment, where the first starts with, “Where do I fit?”
- Every business owner believes in alignment, but it’s never a priority until it’s a problem.
- Mark calls Susannah’s book simple and practical, and the one HR book managers will read from beginning to end.
- Susannah’s favorite business book: The Science of Dream Teams.
Are you ready to unlock the secrets of successful organizations and apply them to your business? In her groundbreaking book, "The Next Step: Transforming Culture and Advancing Business Results through Organizational Design," Susannah offers an in-depth, practical guide to understanding and improving organizational design.
Susannah’s Consulting Firm Reminds Me of The HP Way
Some of my favorite people at the companies I work with are the HR professionals. They are friendly, intelligent, caring, and focused. They want to see those around them succeed.
Then, I came across a book that is now one of my favorites in the management genre. Imagine your company not having an HR department for the first 18 years. That seems implausible.
When I read non-fiction, I rarely read the chapters in order. When I opened The HP Way, I started at Chapter 11, Managing the Organization. HP waited nearly 20 years before they hired their first Personnel Director (the term used then). Yet, the founders took the employee-manager relationships seriously during those first 18 years, which included promoting from within, providing constant feedback to staff, offering profit sharing plans to all team members, and many other activities showing the importance of every team member.
“Get the best people, stress the importance of teamwork, and get them fired up to win the game,” said David Packard. This is why Jim Collins said, “Their greatest product was the Hewlett-Packard Company and their greatest idea was The HP Way.”
When I read Beyond the Boxes and Lines, I thought of The HP Way. Susannah is too humble to say this about herself, but she embodies The HP Way with her tools, methods, frameworks, and thinking. Susannah is a CPO who deserves to be on any small or mid-sized business team.
Episode Pairings
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