M is for Management —
Intent, measured and managed.
Last week I wrote about Organization — seeing the terrain before you lead it. Once a leadership team can see the terrain, the question changes. Not who is here, but where are we going, and how will we know we're getting there?
That's M — Management.
In The OMCE Method™, management means understanding business intent and strategy, then using meeting agendas to drive priorities, gain alignment, and allocate time and resources.
It starts with strategy and vision. Goals and KPIs reinforce it. And it holds — or doesn't — on the discipline of the agenda.
Three modules.
Module 4Strategy & Visioning
Every business has an intent. Not all of them have articulated it.
The work here is drawing out what the company is actually trying to become, in language specific enough to act on.
- Where is the growth coming from?
- What are we willing not to do?
- What does winning look like in three years? And
- What has to be true in the next twelve months for that to still be possible?
This is the part leaders often assume is finished. It rarely is.
I've sat with teams where every person could recite the mission statement, and no two could describe the strategy the same way.
A vision that lives in one leader's head is not a vision. It's an intention.
The output is a strategy the team can state in their own words — and defend to someone who wasn't in the room.
Module 5Goal & KPI Setting
Strategy without measurement is a wish.
So the next move is translating intent into goals, and goals into a small number of indicators that actually signal progress.
The discipline is in the restraint. A dozen KPIs is not a scorecard; it's noise.
I look for the few measures that ladder cleanly from the executive team to the individual contributor, so that a person three levels down can see how their week connects to the plan.
And a caution worth naming: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure — what economists call Goodhart's Law.
Teams optimize for what is counted. So the choosing matters more than the counting — and the reading of the data matters most of all, because indicators are there to tell you when the plan needs to change, not to prove the plan was right.
Module 6Agenda Management
This is the module leaders underestimate, and the one that carries the others.
Intel's legendary leader Andy Grove called the meeting the medium through which managerial work is performed, in High Output Management. That's right. The agenda is where strategy either becomes priority or quietly dissolves into whatever is loudest that week.
Agenda management is the discipline of deciding what earns time. It means guidelines and rigor to hold the focus — and systems to read the data and adjust when the business calls for it. Advance, pivot, change. The agenda is not a formality. It's how a leadership team allocates its two scarcest resources: attention and money.
Run it poorly, and the calendar becomes a record of missed opportunities.
Why this pillar matters now
Organization tells you who is in the room. Management tells you what the room is for.
In most companies I walk into, the strategy isn't missing. It's unmeasured, or it never reaches the agenda — alive in a document and absent from the meeting calendar.
The gap between intent and execution is rarely a thinking problem. It's a management problem, and it's fixable.