Showing posts with label org development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label org development. Show all posts

Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business: 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning Review

Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business: 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning
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Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business: 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning ReviewCharan's credentials include co-authoring the bestseller "Execution". His writing is very much down-to-earth, no-nonsense, and straightforward. So when he says 10 tools for Monday morning, believe him! Here they are:
1. MAKE REVENUE GROWTH EVERYONE'S BUSINESS. Just like a cost reduction agenda may be a permanent theme in daily conversations and meetings in all departments, so should revenue growth be. And it's not just for the management, it's for all employees to think in this direction (just like we try with the cost reduction agenda).
2. HIT MANY SINGLES AND DOUBLES, NOT JUST HOME RUNS. While home runs provide the opportunity for a quantum leap, they are unpredictable and don't happen all the time. Singles and doubles, however, can happen every day of the year. This piece of advice may sound somewhat trivial. But for what it's worth, my experience from especially larger firms is that it may turn out to be the most important tool. Many big corporations tend to devote too much thinking into finding the big home run - and may give too little attention to the many small growth areas that short-term perhaps do not make an important contribution, but often keep the organization full of life and energy - and well-prepared for take-off...if the elusive home run should materialise.
3. SEEK GOOD GROWTH AND AVOID BAD GROWTH. Good growth not only increases revenues but improves profits, is sustainable over time, and does not use unacceptable levels of capital. It is also primarily organic (internally generated) and based on differentiated products and services that fill new or unmet needs, creating value for customers. Charan constantly challenges leaders that seek acquisitions as primary driver for revenue growth ... instead of organic growth.
4. DISPEL THE MYTHS THAT INHIBIT BOTH PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS FROM GROWING. Confront excuses such as: "We are in a no-growth industry, and no one is growing"; "Customers are buying only on price"; or "The distributors are the ones in direct contact with retailers, and there's not much I can do."
5. TURN THE IDEA OF PRODUCTIVITY ON ITS HEAD BY INCREASING REVENUE PRODUCTIVITY. The old saw says, "We have to do more with less." The problem, though, is that the focus is usually on the "less" and the "more" rarely happens. Revenue productivity is a tool for getting that elusive "more" by actively and creatively searching for ideas for revenue growth without using a disproportionate amount of resources.
6. DEVELOP AND IMPLEMENT A GROWTH BUDGET. All companies have a budget. It is, however, astonishing how little detail about revenue and sources of revenue growth you can find there. Almost all of the lines in the budget are cost-related. Few, if any, identify resources explicitly earmarked for growth. The growth budget provides a foundation that will allow a company to increase revenues instead of just talking about it.
7. BEEF UP STRATEGIC MARKETING. One of the key missing links for generating revenue growth at most firms is strategic marketing. Most people visualize marketing as tactical tools such as advertising, promotion, and brand-building. Strategic marketing, on the other hand, takes place at a much earlier stage by identifying and precisely defining which customer segments to focus on. It analyzes how the end-user uses the product or service and what competitive advantage will be required to win the customer and at what price points. Charan is using the term "upstream marketing". But I find it a weird way of describing strategic marketing. So I changed it.
8. UNDERSTAND HOW TO DO EFFECTIVE CROSS-SELLING (or value/solutions selling). Cross-selling can be a significant source of revenue growth, but most companies approach it from exactly the wrong perspective. They start by saying, "What else can we sell to our existing customer base?" Instead of looking inside-out your organization, you need to look outside-in. Successful cross-selling starts by selecting a segment of customers and then working backward to define precisely the mix of products and services they need and creatively shaping a value proposition unique to them.
9. CREATE A SOCIAL ENGINE TO ACCELERATE REVENUE GROWTH. Every organization is a social system, the center of which is a way of thinking and acting that sets both day-to-day actions and the long-term agenda. When an organization has an explicit growth agenda understood by everyone, growth becomes a central focus--a social engine--during formal meetings as well as informal discussions. This tool is closely linked to tool no. 1.
10. OPERATIONALIZE INNOVATION BY CONVERTING IDEAS INTO REVENUE GROWTH. Innovation is not the private property of lone geniuses working apart from the mainstream of the business. In any company of reasonable size, innovation is a social process that requires collaboration and communication for idea generation, selecting those ideas for revenue growth that are to be funded, and shaping those ideas into product prototypes and launching them into the marketplace.
Those were the 10 tools. I find the conclusion to be that revenue growth must supplement a cost reduction agenda (though you may want to wait 6-9 months after the efficiency programme have been initiated before embarking on the growth theme). Too many firms focus narrowly on cost cuttings, but to survive long-term we need to have the growth engine to be running as well (singles and doubles are just fine!). Charan explains how to make it work in practice.
Peter Leerskov,
MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-businessProfitable Growth Is Everyone's Business: 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning Overview

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What the CEO Wants You to Know : How Your Company Really Works Review

What the CEO Wants You to Know : How Your Company Really Works
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What the CEO Wants You to Know : How Your Company Really Works ReviewDr. Charan has used his decades of experience with top CEOs to write a book that explains the overall concepts and focus of a successful business using simple metaphors. "The best CEOs . . . are able to take the complexity and mystery out of business by focusing on the fundamentals." "And they make sure everone in the company . . . understands these fundamentals." If you work in a small part of a large organization and don't understand how what you do contributes to the whole, this book will be a revelation to you. If you do not understand how business people think and would like to learn, this book will help you more than any five courses you could take.
The book is organized into four parts.
In part one, you learn the universal language of business though concepts like inventory, product mix, merchandising, pricing, return on assets, customer focus, product quality, cash generation, growth, and finding out what you need to change from customers. The primary metaphor used here is that of a street vendor who is selling fruit in India and cannot afford to have a bad day. Dr. Charan fleshes out the examples by referring to his family's shoe business, and to decisions taken by leading executives he has worked with (like Jack Welch of General Electric, Jac Nassar of Ford, and Dick Brown at EDS).
In part two, he talks about how to use these concepts in the real world. His key point is to take the measurements and create a focus on 3 or 4 key activities that will make the most difference. He also relates this work to expanding the value of the company's share price.
In part three, he turns his attention to getting key tasks done. This involves putting the right people in the right jobs, improving group effectiveness (usually by putting in place activities that provide more timely focus), and how to lead change. Dick Brown is the key example in this last area.
In part four, you pay attention to what you need to do to aply these concepts to your own situation so you "become a businessperson first" in your approach to everything. This part gives you help with assessing the whole business, cutting through complexity, providing focus, helping others expand their abilities and synchronize with their colleagues to be more effective, and being a leader (regardless of your role now).
You are left then with this challenge: "What are you going to do to help your company's money making in the next sixty to ninety days?
The book is quite simple and can be read fairly quickly. I think that few will be confused by it. If you have questions, ask someone who has some business education to help you.
The book's great strength is its simplicity. It takes business concepts and approaches down to the lowest common denominator. For many people, this will provide a great advance over doing what is best for the way you are measured in your part of the organization. But you will have to get those measurements changed if you want focus and behavior to improve in a lasting way.
The book's weaknesses are in four areas. First, the street vendor and shoe company examples won't work for everyone. I suspect that a carefully drawn lemonade stand example would have worked better since almost everyone in the United States has either had one of those or been a customer of one.
Second, it is a little opaque from the material here how to find the key leverage points to improve the business. Talking to your customers will get their issues, but then what do you do next? This subject implies doing some systems thinking, and the basis for doing that work isn't laid here.
Third, the material on stock price improvement is weak. It also doesn't have any connection to a simple example. You are just expected to take his conclusions. It would have been easy to strengthen this section by extending the analogy of how a family that depends on a business feels when the business doesn't do well. I actually thought the Ford example was one of failure rather than success. Reasonable people will differ on these things.
Fourth, most businesses today need totally improved economic models rather than evolution of the ones they are using now. This book doesn't adequately surface that key point. In fact, the examples are drawn from companies that have done relatively little to change business models.
The person who will get the most benefit from this book will be the executive who wants to get her or his colleagues more involved in thinking like CEOs (and shareholders). You could take this book, and refocus it around simple examples that fit your business, and use examples of focus from things you are working on now. That would make this book extremely beneficial.
Help people understand what the issues are, how to think about those issues, encourage everyone to come up with better solutions, and make it simple and easy to experiment with new approaches. That approach can help you make progress much faster.
Take on the big picture!What the CEO Wants You to Know : How Your Company Really Works Overview

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The War for Talent Review

The War for Talent
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The War for Talent ReviewThe New Yorker (July 22, 2002) had an article that referred to "The War for Talent" that summed up what I felt after finishing the book (I paraphrase): The book largely amounts to an argument for indulging A employees, fawning over them, and "allowing them to find out what they like most to be doing." Malcolm Gladwell's article really articulated my feeling about Enron, my former company and how management talked about encouraging risk and allowing "A talents" to be the dynamic driving force WITH little regard to organizational structure or goals. The resulting chaos of having dozens of self-proclaimed geniuses pursuing their objectives, while often hidden from outsiders, makes me very wary of some consultant's pet theory that ignores divisions duplicating efforts, repeating mistakes, raiding each others "talent" employees, low office morale and intense political jockeying for advancement (which, ironically, was independent of performance). This book is another tiresome example of tired old "hero" worship; it makes me regret ever having gone to b-school. We MBAs are really screwing things up.The War for Talent Overview

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Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors Review

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
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Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors ReviewMichael E. Porter is a professor at Harvard Business School and a leading authority on Strategy and Competitiveness. He did his MBA and Ph.D from Harvard. He has served as an advisor to several business and government organizations. He was also a founder of the strategy and management consulting firm, Monitor Group.
Professor Porter is best known for his landmark books that defined the field of Strategy - Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (1980) and Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance (1985). These books are must reads at the leading business schools.
I read Competitive Strategy (1980) for a Strategy course. It starts with a bang. On the very second page of the first chapter you will find the figure for the famous Five Forces Driving Industry Competition. While Porter did not intend this framework to be used for case interviews, in reality, this is a very important framework to know for the case interviews conducted by leading strategy and management consultancy firms. All top MBAs and anybody who has ever been hired by the best strategy and management consultancy firms knows this framework, and has probably read this book. The first chapter immediately proceeds to explaining each of the five forces:
1. Threat of new entrants
2. Intensity of rivalry among existing competitors
3. Pressure from substitute products
4. Bargaining power of buyers
5. Bargaining power of suppliers
While the first chapter alone is worth the cost of this book, I recommend it for the wisdom contained in the rest of the book. The chapters are organized under three parts (General Analytical Techniques, Generic Industry Environments, and Strategic Decisions). There are several thought provoking discussions on concepts such as A Framework for Competitor Analysis (Future goals, Assumptions, Current strategy, Capabilities), Market Signals and a Strategic Analysis of Vertical Integration.
This book is the single most important book on business strategy. It is a classic - like the management classics of Peter Drucker. As with every classic, the examples are old (not to be confused with outdated). But, the competition HP faced for electronic calculators in the 70s, it still faces for computers today. There have been several changes in the players, technology, industries, globalization, etc, but the foundation built by Porter's masterpieces are still relevant today.
Porter's second book Competitive Advantage (1985) introduced another important tool - The Value Chain. This analyzes primary activities (Inbound logistics, Operations, Outbound logistics, Marketing and Sales, Services) and support activities (Procurement, Technology development, Human resource management, Firm infrastructure) that firms must analyze to create value and competitive advantage.
If my review was helpful to you, I request you to select "Yes" so that the rating is improved and more readers will get to read it.Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors Overview

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The Human Resources Glossary, Third Edition: The Complete Desk Reference for HR Executives, Managers, and Practitioners Review

The Human Resources Glossary, Third Edition: The Complete Desk Reference for HR Executives, Managers, and Practitioners
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The Human Resources Glossary, Third Edition: The Complete Desk Reference for HR Executives, Managers, and Practitioners ReviewThis is a rich volume providing over 8,500 entries pertaining to all areas of human resource management. It includes information on over 350 associations, federal laws and court decisions, and abbreviations and acronyms. The definitions are usually detailed, giving the book the quality of an encyclopia. This is an excellent resource. It includes full contact information for associations and other organizations. Names of laws are explained. It is an interesting book just to thumb through. Highly recommended.The Human Resources Glossary, Third Edition: The Complete Desk Reference for HR Executives, Managers, and Practitioners Overview

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The Changing World of the Executive (Drucker Library) Review

The Changing World of the Executive (Drucker Library)
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The Changing World of the Executive (Drucker Library) ReviewMr Drukker presents a very smart outlook of management in the 80's with a prediction of the times to come. The book ends with a question whether this book will hold up for future readers. 20 years later the answer is yes. How are we defined as a nation in terms of our corporations ? This is described. How is sexual harrassment defined and handled? How do we compare to other nations such as Japan and Germany? There is no ego made by the author. He recognizes that he is an expert in the subject matter and lectures with clarity and without any sense of condescendingness.The Changing World of the Executive (Drucker Library) Overview

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