Each organization culture is different. Getting a clear road map for these three questions is important, and is best achieved by collaborative discussion. Having such a collaborative discussion is not easy. In general management successions, the going-in mandates were usually not very specific about what actions to take. They focused on more general parameters, such as competitive position, market share, growth, and contribution objectives.
Managers often find that, in practice, they have less authority than they had been led to believe.
The Achieve, Preserve, and Avoid framework can serve as a useful way to organize that important mandate. The greater the clarity at the front end of the assignment, the less the later confusion. As a result, their diagnoses of situations tended to be much more narrowly focused and incomplete. Finally, they made changes that were perceived as inappropriate or ineffective, either because the changes were based on partial or incorrect diagnoses of problems or because the changes were badly implemented by a management group that did not support them. Regardless of industry, size, or country, there was a tendency for management changes to come in waves of three, with the second change being the most dramatic and the last change being a refinement of the major changes that took place in the second wave.