Even the most well thought out initiatives will fail without true employee ownership, accountability, and engagement. Yet most managers and executives don’t have a clear system for ensuring the support they need from those around them. The Power of Strategic Commitment helps readers improve their strategic processes by enlisting the support of managers, employees, boards, suppliers, investors, and others. The book outlines the key factors that determine commitment, providing powerful ways to build buy-in that cost nothing. Readers will discover how to:continuously measure buy-ininvolve everyone in creating their own piece of a larger organizational futuretailor commitment strategies for individual employeeskeep everyone on the road to achieving stated goalscreate a commitment-inspiring rewards systemhire fully-engaged talentThis book provides practical methods for getting everyone behind the kind of important organizational actions that drive results.
Setting / LocationGlobal
Story EraContemporary / Future
Protagonist / CoreThe power of strategic commitment Lead Character
Scenario planning allows companies to move away from linear thinking and better understand external change. Eight years (and 30,000 copies) after publication Scenarios is still acknowledged as the definitive work in the field. Now, Kees van der Heijden brings his bestseller up to date, following up on his original case studies and adding significant new material. The Second Edition changes focus slightly by providing more in-depth analysis and application of the concept of the 'strategic conversation'. While maintaining the underlying rigour of the first edition, van der Heijden revisits the text to make it far more practical and accessible, and in doing so gives you the tools you need to set out and negotiate a successful future course for your organization in the face of significant uncertainty.
Is your company on a clear track to the future, with a defined goal that sets its direction and with determined employees powering its engine? Or is it stumbling toward whatever comes next, dragged along by circumstance, or "staying the course" out of fear? Karl Albrecht, renowned business thinker and co-author of the bestseller Service America!, challenges today's business leaders to embark on a journey on The Northbound Train. His northbound train is a metaphor for achieving a focused vision of the direction your company must take to succeed and then moving inexorably toward that goal. And as Albrecht shows, this vision must always be based upon an understanding of what will create value for your customers. In The Northbound Train Albrecht provides a step-by-step guide to soul searching, strategy setting, and customer wooing. Using insightful, real-world examples of effective and ineffective processes, he helps you map out a path - a strategic success model - that your company must follow to find out what makes its business unique. He illustrates how to formulate a reality-based vision; define your company's core values and philosophy; create a company mission statement that is accurate, concise, and inspiring; evaluate your competitive strategy to see if it's based on real strengths; reach a unified concept for creating value for your customers; and distill these decisions, finally, into a few critical areas of focus. Of course, all this thinking and planning is useless if the people in your organization are not "on board." Albrecht explains that "the leader must help people in the organization understand and commit to the vision. And the leader must help them learn to do what it takes to make the vision a reality." The author provides advice for exactly how to lead your company (or your portion of the company) in the right direction and how to reward employees based on their real, verifiable contributions to that end-of-the-track goal. Is your company ready to board the northbound train? The trip requires just three things: the eagerness to ask fundamental business questions, the courage to listen to the answers and face what must be done, and the stamina to keep at it until the necessary changes take place. The Northbound Train will stock you with the provisions you need to be successful: the inspiration of a great business thinker and a process for keeping on track.
"How would you like to have a consultant interrogate you in detail about your company's product, quality standards, and shipping methods, force you to admit exactly how you and your staff had dropped the ball, and ask you point-blank what you were going to do about it--while every single one of your employees watched and listened? According to Dan Dimancescu, this kind of meeting is not only a good idea--it's just one ripple of a huge wave of change in management that is absolutely vital to the future of American business." "Dimancescu, who has been a consultant to such companies as AT&T, Boeing, Digital, HP, NASA, and Xerox, has witnessed scenes like the one above over and over in Japan. Those employees and the boss who was being put on the hot seat were involved in a concept still very foreign to American business: cross functional management.^ Holistic in nature, cross functional management aims that everyone from the CEO on down to the delivery truck driver understands the company's goals, failings, and triumphs, and the part he or she contributes. Instead of workers blindly following the new systems or procedures instituted by management, everyone learns to improve their performance as a group, and to internalize knowledge across the whole team. It's a system in which process--not just results, but how to get things done--is the top priority. The results are, quite simply, astonishing." "Dimancescu believes that cross functional management can and must be our future. He looks at the recent achievements of companies including Ford, AT&T, and Hewlett Packard, and the growing popularity of holistic initiatives like time-to-market and concurrent engineering.^ He details what senior executives must do to lay the groundwork, and describes six steps to follow: access the opportunity, appoint a process core team, target a pilot project, use the cross function "tool kit," review the pilot, and plan and implement a rollout. The Seamless Enterprise provides the vision, systematic model, tools, and techniques every company needs to achieve the new dynamic edge--and unleash the long-stifled collective genius in American enterprise."--BOOK JACKET.
The ultimate inside story of the Katrina tragedy—from the cofounder of the LSU Hurricane CenterAfter warning for years about the looming threat of catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, Ivor van Heerden was one of the highest-profile media experts during the Katrina disaster. Over the following eighteen months, he was even more prominent as he challenged the official version of those events and campaigned for an engineering plan that would protect all of southeastern Louisiana, once and for all. In The Storm, van Heerden lays out in full detail the stunning incompetence among the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the Army Corps of Engineers that culminated in the catastrophe that crippled, perhaps forever, a great American city.
The power of strategic commitment by Josh Leibner, Gershon Mader, Alan Weiss | Literally Just Books
