Ruthless Consistency: How Committed Leaders Execute Strategy, Implement Change, and Build Organizations That Win
Michael Canic
McGraw-Hill (September 2020)

How to avoid “the unintended, unrecognized, and unforgivable consequences of failure”

I agree with Michael Canic: “The tragedy of repeated failures is how they poison organizational culture. It becomes easy for people — starting with you — to rationalize anything but success. And it becomes all but impossible to get people to believe in and support the next [strategic change initiative]. The culture of failing becomes self-perpetuating.” It illustrates ruthless consistency.

I also agree with Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. Long ago, Edison insisted that an initiative is a “failure” only if nothing of value is learned from it. Einstein observed, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

In this context, let’s add one other opinion, offered by Michael Porter: “The essence of strategy is choosing what [begin italics] not [end italics] to do.” Porter’s comment offers a valuable reminder, as does this one from Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

I thought about these observations as I worked my way through Canic’s probing and illuminating narrative. His stated objective is to explain “how committed leaders execute strategy, implement change, and build organizations that win” by taking a different approach to the process of strategy formulation. In essence, he urges leaders to think strategically about a strategic change initiative (SCI).  He identifies and examines three separate but interdependent principles that should guide and inform that process. They determine the success of the given SCI.

1. Everything matters: “Every decision. Every action. All the arrows point in the right direction. Consistently.” Canic urges cohesive and comprehensive alignment of all of the SCI’s components: who, what, where, when, why, and how.

2. What you do is not as important as what your people experience: “What matters is what [begin italics] they [end italics] perceive, what [begin italics] they [end italics] believe, and what they [begin italics] feel [end italics]. Why? They’re the ones doing the work.” Success depends on what they do and how well they do it. Consistently.

3. Total commitment: “You’re not as committed and you need to be…yet.” Understand the critically impirtant difference between the will to win and the [begin italics] the will to do whatever it takes to win [end italics]. Consistently.

Canic carefully identifies the WHAT of ruthless consistency when planning and then executing an SCI. The greater value of the book, in my opinion, is found in his brilliant discussion of the HOW. If his approach has a “secret sauce” for success, it probably consists of a leadership team of the right people with total commitment as well as credibility; razor-sharp focus on the given objectives; a workplace environment within which personal growth and professional development are most likely to thrive; and, as I would characterize it, an understanding of the entire forest as well as all of each tree and the leaves, bark, and sap that comprise it.

With this book, Michael Canic makes an immense contribution to thought leadership, especially now when the need for successful SCIs is greater than at any prior time that I can recall. Ultimately, however, the value of the information, insights, and counsel that he provides in abundance will be determined by how well a reader absorbs, digests, and then applies what is most relevant to the given situation.