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96 The McKinsey Mind

through your client’s eyes because it forces you to concentrate on
the client’s foremost needs, even if some of them don’t immediately
affect what you’re doing. Accenture’s Jeff Sakaguchi explains:

Even though we may not even be working on that specific
area, keeping those things in mind certainly gives us a bet-
ter sensitivity for the types of things that the client is or
should be wrestling with. I’ve found many times that if I
have a good picture of what the CEO agenda should be—
even if it may not be what that current CEO is working on—
sooner or later they come around to my way of thinking.

Depending on your position and power within your organiza-
tion and on your corporate culture, you may have to rely on some-
one else’s conception of the CEO focus (perhaps, even, your
CEO’s). Nevertheless, the CEO focus should be your touchstone as
you put together your recommendation.
As your next step, ask how your decisions will add value to
your client or organization. For each action that you recommend,
how large will the payoff be? Is it large enough to justify the
required commitment of time, energy, and resources? How does it
compare to the other recommendations you make? If it is signifi-
cantly smaller in terms of potential result, other, larger projects
should come first. As chair of retail banking at Key Corp., Jim Ben-
nett had to make decisions like this every day:

For me, the metric has to be, “Is this really going to make a
difference?” At Key, as in most companies, decisions are typ-
ically input-oriented rather than performance- and output-
oriented. We tried to change that paradigm by going public
with performance commitments—“We’re going to grow our
earnings by X”—which put us on the hook to come up with
projects that would meet that goal. This focus on funda-