RSS - PostsThe Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage
The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage
Robert Steven Kaplan, David P. Norton
In a world of stiffening competition, business strategy is more crucial than ever. Yet most organizations struggle in this area–not with formulating strategy but with executing it, or putting their strategy into action. Owing to execution failures, companies realize just a fraction of the financial performance promised in their strategic plans.
It doesn’t have to be that way, maintain Robert Kaplan and David Norton in The Execution Premium. Building on their breakthrough works on strategy-focused organizations, the authors describe a multistage system that enables you to gain measurable benefits from your carefully formulated business strategy. This book shows you how to:
- Develop an effective strategy–with tools such as SWOT analysis, vision formulation, and strategic change agendas
- Plan execution of the strategy–through portfolios of strategic initiatives linked to strategy maps and Balanced Scorecards
- Put your strategy into action–by integrating operational tools such as process dashboards, rolling forecasts, and activity-based costing
- Test and update your strategy–using carefully designed management meetings to review operational and strategic data
Drawing on extensive research and detailed case studies from a broad array of industries, The Execution Premium presents a systematic and proven framework for achieving the financial results promised by your strategy.
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Social Entrepreneurship For Dummies
Social Entrepreneurship For Dummies
Social Entrepreneurship For Dummies 2010 Edition
In today’s business world, your bottom line isn’t measured by your company’s financial performance alone. Social Entrepreneurship For Dummies shows you how to implement social responsibility to your business plan in order to increase your bottom line.This book helps any social entrepreneur gain the necessary skills needed to change the system and spread the solution, while providing explanations of the most successful business tools being used today.
- A complete reference on the ideas and processes associated with social entrepreneurship
- Provides a foundation and business plan for those looking to create their own socially oriented business venture
Social Entrepreneurship For Dummies gives you the trusted and friendly advice you need to get on your way toward social responsibility!
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Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate
Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate
by Michael Hammer
Business Process Reengineering
Despite many years of restructuring and downsizing through process rationalization and automation, US companies have not obtained the 
improvements that she needed. This can be attributed to companies leaving the existing processes intact and using computers simply to speed them up! But speeding up those processes cannot address their fundamental performance deficiencies. Many of the job designs, work flows, control mechanisms, and organizational structures came of age in a different competitive environment and before the advent of the computer. Instead of computerizing outdated processes, we should “reengineer” the business processes, that is, to use the power of the computer to radically redesign the business the processes. Only through such a radical approach can companies achieve great improvement in their performances.
The process of “reengineering” involves the breaking of old, traditional ways of doing business and finding new and innovative ways. And from the redesigned processes, new rules will emerge that will determine how the processes will operate. The reengineering process is an all-or-nothing proposition, the results of which are often unknown until the completion of its course. Continue reading
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Teaching Smart People How to Learn
Teaching Smart People How to Learn
by Chris Argyris 
Competitive success depends on learning, but most people, including professionals in leadership positions, are not very good at it. Learning is a function of how people reason about their own behavior. Yet most people engage in defensive reasoning when confronted with problems. They blame others and avoid examining critically the way they have contributed to problems. Companies need to make managers’ and employees’ reasoning patterns a focus of continuous improvement efforts.
This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading.
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Leadership That Gets Results
Article Summary: Goleman, D. (2000) Leadership that gets results. Harvard Business Review, March-April, pp 78-90
Goleman proposes that effective leaders use a combination of six distinct leadership styles. They need to fluid in dynamic in the application of different styles:
:”… the research indicates that leaders with the best results do not rely on only one leadership style, they use most of them in a given week – seamlessly and in different measure – depending on the business situation.” (78-79)
The findings are based on research from Hay/McBer with random sample of 3871 executives from a worldwide database.
The six leadership styles are:
- Coercive: demand immediate compliance
- Authoritative: mobilize people toward a vision
- Affiliative: create emotional bonds and harmony
- Democratic: build consensus through participation
- Pacesetting: expect excellence and self-direction
- Coaching: develop people for the future.
Goleman expands on the concept of emotional intelligence. He breaks the construct down into the following elements:
- Self-awareness
– emotional
– accurate
– confidence - Self-management
– self-control
– trustworthiness
– conscientiousness
– adaptability
– achievement orientation
– initiative - Social Awareness
– empathy
– organizational awareness
– service orientation - Social Skill
– visionary leadership (take charge and inspire)
– influence
– developing others
– communication
– change catalyst
– conflict management
– building bonds
– teamwork and collaboration
Emotional intelligence can be increased. It needs to be done slowly through coaching. The use of 360 degree feedback is useful for uncovering blind-spots. It involves more than the neocortex – it is not just cognitive, “Brain circuits that carry leadership habits have to unlearn the old ones and replace them with the new one.” (90). The behavioural sequence needs to be repeated – until new neural pathways become the default.
Goleman gave specific attention to coaching, suggesting that this form of leadership allowed for short term failure for long term learning. He wrote, “Of the six styles, our research found that the coaching style is used least often.” (87)
The leaders interviewed initially thought that coaching would take too long, but realised that it paid dividend in the long term. Coaching was seen as distinct in focusing on personal development rather than the immediate task. It was, however, seen as effective in improving results, “The reason: it requires constant dialogue, and that dialogue has a way of pushing up every driver of climate”:
“In short, it [coaching] works best with employees who want to be coached. By contrast, the coaching style makes little sense when employees, for whatever reason, are resistant to learning or changing their ways. And it flops if the leader lacks the expertise to help the employee along. The fact is, many managers are unfamiliar with or simply inept at coaching, particularly when it comes to giving ongoing performance feedback that motivates rather than creates fear or apathy”
He writes, “Although the coaching style may not scream ‘bottom-line results’, it delivers them”. (87)
Goleman found that leadership effectiveness tends to be negatively impacted by the pacesetting style (it can be overwhelming – but good with self-motivated professionals) and also negative with the coercive styles. This style can be effective but should be used with extreme caution. It is useful in emergencies and for some problem employees.
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Microsoft Word 2010 All-In-One for Dummies
Microsoft Word 2010 All-In-One for Dummies
A complete guide to the world’s most popular word processing software
Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software on the planet, and the most-used application in the Microsoft Office productivity suite. Along with the rest of Office, Word has been enhanced with new features and capabilities in the 2010 version.
Word’s many users will find new things to learn and use in Word 2010, and this all-in-one guide gets them up to speed while providing a reference for taking Word to the next level.
- Word is the top-selling application in the Microsoft Office suite and is the leading word processing software
- Both newcomers to Word and experienced users will need instruction in Word 2010’s new features, including online editing capabilities, online document collaboration, and an improved search function
- Nine minibooks cover Word basics, editing, formatting, inserting bits and pieces, publishing documents, using reference features, mailings, customizing Word, and special features for developers
Word 2010 All-in-One For Dummies makes it easier for Word users everywhere to get up and running with Word 2010 and its new features.
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Microsoft Excel and Access Integration With Microsoft Office 2007
Microsoft Excel and Access Integration With Microsoft Office 2007
Although many people rarely go from Excel into Access or vice versa, you should know that Microsoft actually designed these applications to work together. In this book, you’ll discover how Access benefits from Excel’s flexible presentation layer and versatile analysis capabilities, while Access’s relational database structure and robust querying tools enhance Excel. Once you learn to make the two work together, you’ll find that your team’s productivity is the real winner.
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Microsoft Office Visio 2007 For Dummies
Microsoft Office Visio 2007 For Dummies
Turn your ideas into diagrams and drawings with Visio’s stencils and templates
If you have an idea you want to get down on electronic paper, Visio 2007 is for you, and so is this book! They’re both flexible and user-friendly. Here’s how to use Visio to capture ideas from simple to intricate, update data in a drawing with a single click, add and manipulate text, work with connectors, and more.
Discover how to
- Create business, engineering, software, or network diagrams
- Format an entire drawing using themes
- Analyze “what-if” scenarios with PivotDiagrams
- Produce layered multipage drawings
- Save drawings to publish on the Web
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Outliers, The Story Of Success
Outliers, The Story Of Success
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Outliers: The Story of Success is a non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, how The Beatles became one of the most successful musical acts in human history, how cultural differences play a large part in perceived intelligence and rational decision making, and how two people with exceptional intelligence, Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer, end up with such vastly different fortunes. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the “10,000-Hour Rule”, claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.
The publication debuted at number one on the bestseller lists for The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, holding the position on the former for eleven consecutive weeks. Generally well-received by critics, Outliers was considered more personal than Gladwell’s other works, and some reviews commented on how much Outliers felt like an autobiography. Reviews praised the connection that Gladwell draws between his own background and the rest of the publication to conclude the book. Reviewers also appreciated the questions posed by Outliers, finding it important to determine how much individual potential is ignored by society. However, the lessons learned were considered anticlimactic and dispiriting. The writing style, deemed easy to understand, was criticized for oversimplifying complex sociological phenomena.
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The Logic of Life
The Logic of Life
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World is a book by Tim Harford published in 2008 by Random House. Harford argues that rational behavior is more widespread than expected in the larger population. He uses economic principles to draw forth the rational elements of supposedly illogical behaviors to illustrate his point.
