Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
The founding principal of Madrona Strategy Works, where he advises leaders on enterprise strategy, organizational design, culture, and leadership-team effectiveness. His research explores how organizations adapt and thrive amid uncertainty and change.
Carl B. Watson, Ph.D., is the founding principal of Madrona Strategy Works, where he advises leaders on enterprise strategy, organizational design, culture, and leadership-team effectiveness. He is also an Affiliated Research Scientist with the Center for Effective Organizations at USC Marshall and a former executive at Nike, Microsoft, and JPMorgan Chase.
As VP of Transformation, Organizational Strategy, and Culture at Nike, Carl and his team drove enterprise transformation across the Nike, Jordan, and Converse Brands, including the strategic translation, design, and activation of the global operating model for the consumer sport evolution. Under his leadership, they successfully launched a new enterprise-wide focus on high-performance teaming and multi-year work to re-energize Nike’s company culture.
Carl led Microsoft’s Organizational Development & Culture Activation team. He was the organizational architect of the strategic shifts for the Entertainment + Devices business and, later, the Windows + Devices Group, shifting these businesses from an operating system on PC hardware to a service powering experiences across devices. He and his team were accountable for major enterprise-wide culture initiatives and evolving the enterprise operating model, during a critical juncture in the company’s industry-defining culture transformation.
His research examines strategic renewal and how organizations build the capabilities to adapt in turbulent environments. Carl holds a Ph.D. in Management, Designing Sustainable Systems from Case Western Reserve University; an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. in Organizational Psychology from the University of Michigan.
Ep 05 | Calling All Control Connoisseurs
Authority, Accountability and Influence
“…you have to give up control to gain influence. Instead of gripping so tightly where the part that other people can play becomes very, very small, you have to open up and release it and allow people to play more central roles in the work.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“When you have important outcomes with no accountability, who do you call? In modern organizations, there's a lot of shared accountability for outcomes. …but the more people who are named accountable for something, the fewer people who actually feel accountable.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“Accountability, as it becomes more fluid, is more difficult for leaders to respond effectively to success and failure, to learn effectively when things happen.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“Informal authority is essentially influence. My influence is either beyond, hopefully, or less than the authority I have formally in the system. …any leader will be a more effective leader, if their influence exceeds their authority.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“...people wanna be empowered, but they don't also wanna be accountable. And you can't be empowered without accountability. That's the opposite of leadership.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
Ep 04 | It's Time for Sense-Breaking
Narrating Organizational Swings
“There’s a sense of, with paradoxes, short term, long term, or ... centralized, decentralized, and there’s a sense that you have to choose. Once you frame something as a paradox then you naturally end up on an extreme, versus thinking that there’s some navigation between that paradox that is actually the right set point.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“They may say the words, ‘I’m a leader who gets things done,’ but their actual brand promise is, I’m a leader who, who makes all the choices, takes all the work takes all the space.’ The higher level idea has been abandoned for a very particular set of means to achieve it.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“When something is sufficiently different than our expectations, then the harder it is for there be enough plausibility to take action, and that’s actually the real work of leadership... You have to say... the way you thought the world worked is not the way the world is working right now and something has to be radically different.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“Behavioral flexibility is actually valuable in the context of, effective leadership. ... and when people have more flexibility that means that they can respond to more environments. And if they don’t, then they’re going to run into a demand from the environment that they cannot meet.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“If the situation demands of us different action that is inconsistent with our previous action, then not considering changing your behavior is a failure to adapt.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“Part of the problem in organizations is experiments are set up to only succeed, which means you limit dramatically the possible information that you can get out of an experiment. And that is actually, that's tragic if the problem is really important.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“I find that the lack of willingness to be clear and to make choices, and in particular to make differential value choices across teams, is not always happening with enough rationality and enough clear decision-making so that the right things happen in the organization.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“The prioritization problem is more difficult because there's a lot more uncertainty and ambiguity around these emergent problems. Being willing to establish exploratory teams, teams that are explicitly doing exploratory work to shape the problem for a decision.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
Ep 03 | Interesting, But Not Important
Prioritizing Emergent Problems
“The short-term, long-term has been a paradox. What we're experiencing now is that the long-term aspects of leading organizations have become more uncertain. It's more difficult to see whether any long-term plans play out, but that paradox has always existed.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“In this environment, the pivot is the point, right? If you don't pivot, you can't reach the goal. I think part of the challenge with a lot of organizations is that their goals and their missions are really prosaic. Though that doesn't inspire people. That doesn't help people figure out what's important versus what's not important.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“It's very difficult to maintain motivation when your work keeps flipping. When the thing that you're working on is, is less relevant or no longer relevant, or you have to pivot constantly.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“You can actually improve your leadership by seeking to understand the choices that people are making through direct observation. Because things are moving so rapidly, the organization's information pump is too damn slow. By the time managers get information, build perspective, the world's already changed.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
Ep 02 | The Pivot Is The Point
Leading In Uncertainty
Ep 01 | We’re Squading Wrong
Getting Flexible Deployments Right
“…everybody becomes overworked because you try to tackle every problem that the system produces, and no organization can do that. You have to choose. Prioritization is a key role of management, and managers who refuse to prioritize fail their teams.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“Conflict often results from a failure of pre-negotiating things that should be pre-negotiated. As a VP in an organization, I have three people I have to negotiate with in most things, to stand up a project or to make space for something. The people on my team are dealing with 10 or 15 people they have to negotiate with, and that's exponentially more difficult.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.
“…these competing priorities from people's home teams actually matter for the work but also create conflict. The core challenge is taking those and making productive use of those competing priorities so that you can actually get a better outcome than you would if it was homed in just one of those teams.”
-Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.