Would You Choose You?: What CEOs must earn before people will carry their strategy - Paperback

by Sondra Kiriakis Norris (Author)

Would You Choose You? is for the CEO of a scaling company who suspects the problem is real and wants more than another framework. It names what actually breaks, shows you where the damage concentrates, the layer just below you that turns strategy into a thousand decisions you never see, and gives you the sequence to repair it.

You will learn:

• Why "execution" is the wrong word for what is failing, and what to call it instead.
• How trust debt accumulates in small moments and quietly taxes everything you are trying to do.
• Why the breakdown forms at one specific layer of your company, and why it is invisible from the top.
• What it actually costs to earn the commitment a strategy runs on, and why you cannot demand it.
• The exact sequence for repairing trust at the top first, then through the organization, so the work holds instead of fading.

It is a short book on purpose. You can read it in an afternoon. It asks one question that decides whether any of the rest is possible, the question your people are already answering about you, whether they say it out loud or not.

The work begins with you. It always did.

Your strategy is sound. Your team is capable. The milestones still slip.

You have tried the obvious fixes. You reorganized. You tightened the goals, rebuilt the dashboard, replaced a few people. The plan looks right on the page and still will not move through the building. And the quiet worry, the one that follows you out of the second-quarter review, is that you cannot tell exactly why.

Here is the uncomfortable answer. Execution stalls are not execution problems. They are trust problems. The discretionary effort your strategy depends on, the part that cannot be required, measured, or bought, is being quietly withheld by capable people running a simple calculation about whether giving you their best pays off or costs them. That calculation is a condition you set. Which means it is one you can change.
This is not a motivational book, and it is not a collection of slogans. It makes a precise argument, drawn from nineteen bodies of research in psychology and organizational behavior, about why sound strategies stall and what releases the effort they need. Then it proves the argument the hard way, inside a real company of more than two thousand people, under about the worst conditions you could pick for it, and shows you what changed.