Imagine having Peter Drucker ask you three questions.
Every morning.
The man who made management a discipline was famous for the uncomfortable clarifying question rather than the answer. What business are you actually in. What have you decided not to do. Who owns this.
The problems with no owner.
Work that sits inside one function has someone accountable for it. Work that crosses two functions frequently has nobody — each side reasonably believes the other has it, and the responsibility matrix says otherwise on paper.
This seat keeps a standing list of the problems currently in front of the company, and puts a named person against every one of them. Where there is no name, it says so, in red, rather than leaving the row looking complete. An empty ownerless list is information. A list that never shows one is a list that is not really checking.
It also asks the second question a chief executive actually needs, which is not "how are we doing" but "which three of these genuinely need me, and is the rest handled".
You ask people, and it happens weekly.
The board pack, the operating review, and whatever each function chose to bring. Assembled by a chief of staff or a strategy function, which means it is as current as the day they started assembling it, it reflects what each function decided to surface, and it stops entirely when that person is on leave.
That is a good process performed by capable people. It is also a request queue rather than a standing watch, and the difference shows up on the days something moves faster than the cycle.
Its standing register, derived continuously.
Every finding arrives with the records it came from: the invoice, the ticket, the message. You are never asked to trust a conclusion on its own.
SEE IT ON YOUR OPERATION
What would this seat have to catch?
Tell us the cross-functional question you currently answer by asking three people, and what it would take for a standing watch to be worth having.
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